The Department of Defense (DoD) is addressing an agency-wide concern with the current use and future of GSA Schedules. DoD officials are working with the GSA to explore new options for contracting. In light of recent budget cutbacks, the looming threat of sequestration, and task forces dedicated to eliminating redundancy in procurement across the department- contracting is at the forefront of reform.

Recently, a new wave of trends has emerged in the Human Resources (HR) market. Regardless of industry, HR organizations, departments, and leaders are focused on leveraging technology in new and creative ways to accurately manage and secure a tremendous amount of company and employee data while facilitating employee access to company and benefit information. As a result, they are turning to their internal IT departments for help streamlining and automating their complex human resource business processes. These technologies are showing improved process adherence and policy compliance, as well as increased employee satisfaction while reducing workload.

A recent Bloomberg Government study reminds us that Federal Government spending on multiple-award contracts (MACs) rose 49 percent to $121 billion over the last four years, more than double the growth rate of all other contracting programs within the Federal Government.

FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) is led by GSA and is a soon-to-be mandatory government wide program that standardizes the government’s approach to authorizing cloud services for use by federal agencies and monitoring those services to ensure that they continue to meet federal cybersecurity requirements.Once a service goes through the initial FedRAMP authorization process, it will get a stamp of approval that all agencies can use to sign off on the service’s ability to meet federal security requirements. FedRAMP is still in pre-launch stage. The launch of its initial operational capabilities is scheduled for June 2012, and the focus will be on infrastructure as a service and e-mail as service. Full operational capabilities are scheduled for the second quarter of fiscal 2013. At this stage, FedRamp will include more diverse products and services. By 2014 the government will move to full implementation with on-demand scalability and all federal agencies will be required to use the FedRAMP process for assessments.

While helping my clients with GSA Contractor Post Award and governement business development services, I’ve found that many have never heard of GSA’s MarkeTips Magazine before. I’d like to take a moment to highlight the magazine and show you how you can use it as a tool to advertise your products and services under a newly awarded GSA Schedule contract. What is MarkeTips?

We’ve all heard the overused cliché, “There are two things everyone can count on: death and taxes.” Well, we can add an additional one to that list – rising healthcare premiums. As the debate on healthcare in Washington rages on, there is one thing we can all agree on and that’s that something needs to be done to reign in skyrocketing healthcare costs. While Congress bats legislation back and forth, there is at least one federal government agency that can be counted on for working hard to deliver tangible results in healthcare: The National Institutes of Health (NIH). NIH invests hundreds of millions of dollars in healthcare technology solutions every year to keep this great nation on the cutting edge of healthcare innovation and advancement. NIH is in the midst of collecting proposals for its multi-billion dollar Chief Information Officer Solutions and Partners 3 (CIO-SP3), an agency wide contract that will give all 29 NIH offices and divisions access to the best information technology services that the commercial sector has to offer. CIO-SP3 is in its 3rd life cycle and this time the agency has made the unprecedented move of offering a small business set-aside equal in size to the unrestricted portion! That’s right – $20 billion to small businesses and $20 billion to the large integrators. Both awarding Prime contractors. NIH anticipates setting aside over 40 positions to small businesses. The best part? There is still time to bid. Proposals are due no later than January 14th. Here are the 10 unique IT Task Areas solicited in CIO-SP3: IT Services for biomedical research and healthcare; Chief Information Officer support; Imaging, including systems and services that support the collection, storage, and retrieval of digital images; Outsourcing, IT services required to assume management and operations of government IT resources and business functions; Operations and maintenance; Integration services and data migration; Critical infrastructure protection and information assurance; Digital government, including the provision of government services through digital, electronic means; Enterprise management systems; and Software development, including customized software applications, database applications, and other solutions not available in off-the-shelf modular software applications.