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GCN Home > 04/07/06 web stories

GSA issues RFI for IT Infrastructure LOB

Industry day to take place April 19

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

The General Services Administration has issued a request for information for the IT Infrastructure Line of Business and set April 19 for an industry day in Washington.

GSA’s Office of Governmentwide Policy, which acts as the procurement arm for the Office of Management and Budget, also has issued an RFI for the Geospatial LOB as well.

IT Infrastructure, Geospatial and Budget Formulation are three new lines of business OMB announced when President Bush sent his fiscal 2007 budget request to Congress in February.

For the IT Infrastructure RFI, GSA and OMB are asking vendors to “describe solutions and implementation approaches for achieving the government’s IT Infrastructure Optimization Initiative vision and goals through the development of common solutions integrated with the Federal Enterprise Architecture.”

OMB estimates that agencies could save as much as $29 billion over 10 years by consolidating infrastructure.

Responses to the RFI are due to GSA by May 5.

The RFI’s goals are to:
  • Find strategies, alternatives and experiences from industry or nonprofit organizations in developing and implementing programs that have been effective in increasing IT infrastructure effectiveness and efficiency
  • Acquire lessons learned for overcoming similar challenges faced by agencies, such as large geographically dispersed workforce, decentralization, legacy systems and limited resources
  • Support the development of a joint business case to implement any common solutions for the 2008 budget process.
The LOB will focus on five areas within IT infrastructure:
  • Data center—hosting and storage servers, software running on the servers, application development and staff support
  • Telecommunications—voice networks, cellular services, land line services, wireless devices, voice over IP appliances, computer networking and software to allow voice communications
  • Data networks—hardware, software, and communications services that let any two computers exchange data
  • Desktop or seat management—workstations, printers, scanners, software and desktop support personnel
  • IT help desk—staff to troubleshoot problems users have with desktop or other IT products.
GSA and the IT Infrastructure task force expect to have a common solution, concept of operations and target architecture finished by June 9 and a business case ready for submission to OMB by August.

“Responses to the RFI should be from the perspective of the IT infrastructure user, provider or consultant at the enterprise level,” the RFI said. “Consolidation and optimization of IT infrastructure represents a significant opportunity to realize future cost savings by taking a more coordinated approach to spending on commodity IT infrastructure.”

More news on related topics: Lines of Business, Management, IT Management



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