The General Services Administration (GSA) released a request for information on January 24 on a draft Discovery blanket purchase agreement (BPA) for its Centers of Excellence (CoE) initiative, a new strategy for acquisition as GSA rolls the program out to more agencies. The RFI is open for comment until February 8.
The Discovery BPA would last three years and support call orders as needed, rather than the one contract approach used for previous CoEs at the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The awards will likely be against IT Schedule 70 “across a wide variety of SINs (Special Item Numbers),” according to the RFI.
“The desired outcome of the Discovery BPA is to emphasize repeatability and scalability. We want to give every agency that works with CoEs access to private sector partners who can provide the expertise and technological know-how successfully implement IT modernization agency-wide,” said Bob De Luca, executive director of the CoE initiative.
The BPA would only support the discovery phase, and not the implementation phase at agency CoEs, “approximately six months” per agency. GSA also noted that there is no estimated value or number of awards, “as it will completely depend on the requirements of each CoE.” The Discovery BPA would provide “a contract to obtain discovery-related work on an as-needed basis and a procurement process that allows project teams to operate in a more agile fashion,” according to the RFI.