GSA Urges OneGov Adoption to Accelerate Unified IT Modernization

Federal acquisition professionals and industry partners must embrace the shift toward unified buying for the General Services Administration’s OneGov strategy to succeed.

GSA launched OneGov in April to move federal software procurement away from siloed, slow buying processes and toward a unified, more efficient model. The initiative seeks to modernize governmentwide purchasing and establish consistent terms and pricing for commercial technology.

“One of the things that I see is changing with that is that we will have better pricing, better terms and conditions and better relationships overall in terms of where we will go in the future with this type of model,” Warren Blankenship, deputy IT category manager for GSA’s IT Government-wide Category Management, said on Friday at ACT-IAC’s Imagine Nation ELC25 conference in Oxon Hill, Maryland.

Lawrence Hale, acting assistant commissioner of the Office of Information Technology Category in GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, urged contracting officers and acquisition professionals to utilize the platform so agencies collectively gain better pricing, stronger vendor terms and more consistent modernization across federal government.

“If we’re representing the lowest cost for the government on critical software that every agency uses, then those integrators who are serving on behalf of those agencies can also take advantage of those reduced costs on behalf of the agencies,” he said. “It also means that contracting officers and acquisition professionals have to get out of their comfort zone … We always like doing the same thing over and over again. We know it works. We know it keeps us out of jail and it gets the job done. But this is going to require people to think, ‘Okay, let me find if there is a OneGov contract for this thing that I need.’”

Carl DeGroote, vice president of Federal at Cisco, said federal and industry leaders need to stop treating agency modernization as separate, one-off efforts. When agencies modernize together, rather than in isolation, they can share tech solutions, avoid duplicating work and break down the information silos that slow governmentwide progress.

“To bifurcate or silo that innovation doesn’t serve anyone,” he said. “So to centralize that under a contractual platform, and then apply the technology – which I assert is the easy part – and make it available for industry to take on the burden of continuously secure, continuously modern, but also to create cost predictability for our customers.”