The U.S. General Services Administration’s (GSA) Technology Transformation Services’ Centers of Excellence (CoE) and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued six Requests for Information (RFI) and their accompanying draft Request for Quotation (RFQ) to gather feedback related to the HUD Phase II work on Friday, May 17. With these RFIs, GSA is looking to validate and improve the approach it is taking with each procurement, allowing the CoE to successfully move into the implementation phase at HUD. The CoE team is also building upon the recommendations and suggestions gathered through the Phase I discovery and assessment efforts.
During Phase I, four of the centers at HUD identified six distinct, but interrelated, needs covering specific efforts required to achieve the objectives of the Cloud Adoption, Contact Center, Customer Experience, and Data Analytics centers:
- The Cloud Adoption team – accelerate the migration of paper-based forms to web-based forms and manage all the legacy data and new data that will go with those forms;
- The Contact Center team – centralize HUD’s knowledge base and customer inquiries into one contact center called HUDCentral;
- The Customer Experience team – build an agency-wide customer experience capability;
- The Data Analytics team – set up an Office of the Chief Data Officer, which will manage data as a strategic asset across HUD;
- The Data Analytics team – use data visualization techniques to create dashboards that provide HUD stakeholders with key data points and increase financial transparency; and,
- The Data Analytics team – utilize advanced analytics techniques to ensure data-driven decision making is established throughout HUD.
Each team will ensure their individual efforts are aligned with the ultimate, mutual goal of instituting the IT modernization efforts of the agency itself.
“As we demonstrated with the RFI for the Discovery BPA, we want to ensure we incorporate private sector best practices in IT along with standard industry practices in procuring technology,” said GSA CoE Executive Director Bob De Luca. “We want to help our agency partners make modernization the norm at their agencies so they can continue to keep up with advances in technology and more easily deliver their critical missions.”
“We are excited to begin this next phase of our modernization efforts,” said HUD Chief Operating Officer Ralph Gaines. “We’re looking forward to seeing how these efforts will further transform the agency and make it more accountable to our customers.”
The six RFIs, and their associated draft RFQs, can be found on GSA’s GitHub repository at https://github.com/GSA/coe-hud-acquisitions, which also includes links to each individual RFI. These will be open for comment until noon EDT on Friday, May 31, 2019.
Please note these are draft RFQs and no award will be issued as a result of this market research-related function. Feedback must be submitted through the Google Forms associated with the RFIs themselves, other forms of feedback submitted through email or other forms of communication will not be accepted.