Agencies Push Data-Driven Acquisition Reforms to Boost Efficiency

Government agencies are increasingly prioritizing reforms and modernizing data practices to streamline procurement, officials said during the 2025 GovCIO Media & Research Federal IT Efficiency Summit in Tysons Corner, Virginia. In an era of rapid technological change, said DOD Principal Deputy CIO Leslie Beavers, agencies need to look holistically at evolving acquisition practices to boost efficiency.

“Acquisition within the department has long been challenging,” she said of traditional procurement methods. “One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they’re doing acquisition within the department is they think of it individually, like they’re buying something for them.”

Kayla Gunter, acting associate CIO and director of the Federal IT Program Management at National Nuclear Security Administration, echoed these challenges, added that agency is addressing these challenges by “moving towards a lot of enterprise licensing and enterprise contracting agreements.” She added that NNSA is collaborating inside and outside of government to improve practices.

“We’re working alongside all of our stakeholders across the nuclear security enterprise to do this to ensure everyone’s needs are met,” said Gunter. “We’re also doing this across the department and with other federal agencies as well.”

Simplifying Acquisition to Promote Efficiency

Joanne Woytek, program director of the NASA Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) program said that SEWP is evolving to support agencies in achieving efficiency via procurement. She said that the upcoming SEWP 6 is moving beyond individual purchases to focus on agency-wide and mission-wide requirements to make buying easier for government through the SEWP governmentwide acquisition contract vehicle.

“An agency… can come together and say, We want to buy this. We don’t know when. We just want to know that it’s always there, and we want to have it set up ahead of time,’” Woytek said. “When the customers come to use [SEWP]. They don’t have to wonder what they should do. They just will have it right there at their fingertips.”

GitLab Staff Federal Solution Architect Sameer Kamani added that evolving acquisition programs are helping government and industry work together toward efficiency.

“Industry has to [land] wherever the federal needs are, and we’re doing a pretty good job of doing that,” Kamani said. “Having these vehicles is critical and important with the understanding that you don’t buy little things. If you buy bigger blocks, you get better scale, better capability and better integration in general.

Data Interoperability is Key

Acquisition data comes in many forms in government, causing chokes in systems. Data interoperability is critical to modernize acquisition and the speed of procurement across agencies, Beavers said. She compared data inconsistency to different fundamental languages that need a translation

“Data is one of the unsung heroes and it has fundamentally been under appreciated. The level of deliberate effort that is required to make data interoperable [is huge],” said Beavers. “If you’ve got a German, a Spaniard and a French person in the room. They only speak their native language. How do you communicate? That’s what we’re that’s what we’re creating: that translation dictionary.”

Woytek added that data quality is paramount to SEWP and its customers and that the latest iteration of the program focuses specifically on data.

“The quality of the data matters, and you can do all you want to try to match it, but if somebody puts their last name first and their first name last …what do you do with that data?” said Woytek. “We took steps to keep moving ahead and looking ahead, ensuring that we had the capacity for the data, and then to keep thinking about what we want to do with it next. In SEWP 6, one of our big focuses is the data quality.”

Gunter offered that her agency is focusing on governance and data strategy. NNSA, she said, set up its National Security Enterprise Data Council to bring together bringing stakeholders to tackle data governance and strategy she said. NNSA, she said, is also piloting data sharing between teams to enhance decision-making across nuclear security programs, streamlining analyses previously delayed by inconsistent formats and definitions.

Beavers added that DOD is piloting a “data dictionary capability” with its Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office and the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office to create a “translation dictionary” for data tags, allowing systems to communicate without redoing workflows. DOD is working to begin a data interoperability pilot soon that it can scale.

“The trick has been to get down to a really narrow focus that theoretically should be easy make that work, and then mature the capability and have it grow over time,” said Beavers. “We should see a full-blown pilot coming out on the data interoperability piece this year, with the strategy toward the end of the year, and then figuring out, how do we actually institutionalize it and continue that growth and maturing and developing.”

Agility, Success and Scaling

DOD’s slow pace, immense size and the “catastrophic effects if you break something” create some roadblocks to scaling programs efficiently, Beavers said. However, said that individual DOD offices’ successes breed other successes, potentially reaching a “tipping point.”

“When you solve a hard problem and it works, people find out about it. They come to you, and there’s a bit of a tipping point that happens, and it starts to grow,” said Beavers. “I think that’s really the key, because the culture change is there… and it does make life better.”

Kamani said that agencies sometime need to see success, which can be a true “light bulb moment” for IT leaders in government.

“Change is hard, yes, but once they saw it, and once they saw the proof in the pudding, and they were like, ‘This is it?’ Those kinds of moments do happen,” said Kamani.

Woytek added that scaling can be done in pieces of successes and that the SEWP program is an example of effective and efficient growth in acquisition.

“We’ve been fortunate in terms of scaling that we’ve grown in increments. We could scale, through time and we obviously grew a great deal in the past 10 years,” said Woytek. We took steps to keep moving ahead and looking ahead, to ensuring that we had the capacity for the data and then to keep thinking about what we want to do with it next.”

Gunter said that agencies need to support a culture of agility. She said that breaking down organizational silos and fostering communities of practice can enable faster decision-making and innovation.

“We are breaking down … silos and we have teams now in place that are encouraging their staff to go out and talk to industry, talk to our labs, plants and scientists … and move faster to deliver more efficiently” she said.