U.S. government agencies will be moving quickly to implement contracting reforms for the procurement of information technology in the wake of policy changes revealed last week by the Office of Management and Budget. For IT vendors competing for a share of the $80bn annual federal IT market, keeping close track of the procurement changes will be crucial to business success.
The procurement reforms are based on OMB's assessment that huge federal IT investments have largely failed to achieve the same level of productivity as similar investments by the private sector.
For IT vendors, the most immediate impact of the reform package presents increased opportunities for marketing cloud-based offerings to the federal government. Other important aspects of the package deal with improvements to contracting vehicles and actions designed to help federal agencies communicate better with the private sector.
In assessing more than 50 troubled federal IT projects over the last 18 months, OMB concluded that one avenue for improving the return on investment was to shift federal projects from separate, stand-alone systems to utilizing the capacity that is available through cloud-based platforms that inherently operate on a shared system basis.
