OASIS Interact Community

Hello everyone and welcome back to the OASIS blog. We’ve had a lot of new folks join our community here at Interact.GSA.gov over the past month and I’d like to thank you all for your interest in OASIS.

Now that I’m on board and up to speed, we’re moving purposefully through the acquisition process. I’m often asked about the schedule of events and milestones for our process. When will we release the Draft RFP? How about the Final RFP? When do we expect to make award? And so forth. As you can imagine, there are a lot of steps we need to go through to ensure that we’re doing things correctly and meeting the needs and expectations of all of our stakeholders. We know you make a lot of plans around the dates we give, so we’re not quite ready to post a schedule. We’re close and you should definitely check back over the next couple weeks. When we have gotten to a point where we’re comfortable announcing specific milestones, we’ll post them here!

Last week, I wrote about the importance of communication and mentioned that I’d be participating in various forums to get the word out about OASIS. I’d like to give you all a heads-up that I will be appearing at the Coalition for Government Procurement’s Spring Conference on April 26 to talk about OASIS. If you plan to attend, I look forward to seeing you there. If you cannot attend, I’ll post my speaking points and presentation here for all to see.

As we begin work on finalizing our acquisition strategy and plan, I’ve been thinking a lot about evaluation factors. Our goal with OASIS is to provide our customers with a contract that allows them to acquire complex, integrated, professional services solutions across multiple disciplines from world class providers.

I’m looking for your thoughts, ideas and inputs to help to develop an evaluation process which is fair, consistent, and discerning. You’ll get the formal chance to comment when we post our draft RFP. But, I’d like to get a head start on that now, by opening a dialogue on how to structure the evaluation of offers.

My question for you, the reader, then is this: what are some indicators of excellence within industry for a contract like OASIS? Given that our goal is to provide customers with a full array of contract types, things like an approved accounting system, a CAS-compliant accounting system, or an approved purchasing system will be vital. Successful performance and experience across the broad array of services OASIS will support is important. We are also researching to learn more about certifications like ISO (xxxx) and CMM to see if these are relevant to our challenge. These are just some of the things we are exploring here in the early stages of the procurement process. I wanted to use this forum to get your input, on these potential factors as well as others that perhaps we have overlooked to date.

I hope you will give this some thought and post your ideas and suggestions either as a comment here or on the Discussion Board of this site.

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