Originally posted at 3:26 p.m. July 26. Updated 9:30 a.m. July 27.
One of the more difficult struggles in federal IT procurement is finding acquisition professionals with the right technical background to ensure agencies are buying the right stuff at the right prices. Since those people are in short demand, the administration is getting ready to launch the TechFAR Hub, a central portal where contracting officials can tap the expertise they need.
The new hub builds on the work of the U.S. Digital Service and Office of Management and Budget, which released the TechFAR Handbook in 2014 as a resource for IT contracting. The hub will be an interactive, developing version of that handbook, including areas for community discussion, detailed IT acquisition support and a full suite of resources under the “Discover IT” section.
The TechFAR Hub “will provide agency personnel involved in the procurement process with practical tools and resources for applying industry best practices to digital service acquisitions,” according to U.S. Chief Acquisition Officer Anne Rung and USDS Administrator Mikey Dickerson, who penned a blog post announcing the new resource on July 26. “Using the TechFAR Hub, acquisition professionals and other stakeholders in digital acquisition can discover resources that describe successful practices, discuss these ideas with other members of the community, get digital IT support through step-by-step aides built by agency experts and then share what they learned with the community.”
Specifically, contracting officials will be able to find advice on strategies and best practices around digital services — coding, integration and other aspects of digitization that aren’t considered commodity IT like hardware and software.
The hub will be part of GSA’s Acquisition Gateway, which itself is central resource for contracting officers in need of specific expertise. The Gateway has been a pet project for the General Services Administration since 2014 and offers procurement officials several pages of information on service categories called hallways.
Rung first mentioned the TechFAR Hub in a March 2015 blog post promoting the Acquisition Gateway and other initiatives
“The hub will allow agencies to accelerate information exchange on the use of agile software development and other techniques used by industry,” she said. “We are emphasizing strategies that are designed to produce quality results in a budget-constrained environment, such as those in the Digital Services Playbook.”
With the announcement that the hub is now live, Rung and Dickerson encouraged contracting officials to try out the new system and send feedback for future iterations.
“Our goal is to refine and shape future content and features around the needs of the acquisition workforce in order to enhance its ability to deliver greater value for each taxpayer dollar spent,” they said in the July 26 blog post.
