With the release of the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB’s) new memo on shared services, the General Services Administration is looking to the opportunity to support the whole-of-government approach that the memo supports, said Keith Nakasone, deputy assistance commissioner for IT Acquisition at the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS).

“Efficiencies and effectiveness need to be built around a whole-of-government approach, and I think there’s a lot of learning opportnites and a lot of cross-agency discussions that can happen where we can learn from one another and start to move to more consolidation of IT acquisitions,” Naksone said at ATARC’s Government Information Technology Executive Council (GITEC) conference today.

He also emphasized the need to share across agencies to find best practices on implementing shared services.

“As we go through this process, we’re going to learn more and more over time, but one of the major things we want to do with cross-agency priorities is to understand, learn, and build best practices using the standards-based approach for future acquisition solutions,” he said

Outside of the memo, Nakasone emphasized how GSA is working to allow more agile acquisitions of IT solutions, highlighting the consolidation of the Cloud SIN on IT Schedule 70 as an example. He also emphasized the effort to build flexibility on GSA schedules and governmentwide acquisition contracts.

“The way we want to build in the future is, if we build something and we know the proof of concept, we know a pilot capability, and we can roll into development and eventually sustainment, we want to start building a portfolio so when we start talking about IT solutions, if we’ve done it once, it’s repeatable and we can use it again,” he said.

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