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GCN Home > 05/01/06 issue

One for all

Sorrenti brings people together in driving federal acqusition

By Richard W. Walker , GCN Staff

How do you pull together the entire acquisition community across the federal government to achieve an extraordinary degree of collaboration on a major cross-agency project? Ask Teresa Sorrenti. She’s done it.

In 2001, Sorrenti, director of the General Services Administration’s Office of Acquisition Systems, was named program manager of the Integrated Acquisition Environment, one of the 24 groundbreaking e-government initiatives under President Bush’s Management Agenda.

Her mission was formidable: to simply, unify and streamline the federal acquisition process. For many in government, the idea of integrating a morass of disparate procurement processes and systems seemed, on the face of it, absurd.

“When she was given this huge project, she gathered acquisition people from across the entire government—if you know government, you know this is impossible,” said Julie Basile, procurement policy analyst for the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy. “You don’t even dream you can do it.”

Undaunted, Sorrenti plunged into the project, adopting a manageable team approach to getting IAE off the ground. The first step, for example, was organizing teams of agency representatives to assemble requirements that met all their needs. She was careful to spread the work around to mitigate the burden of participating in the project.

“We set up rotating teams and broke them up according to the different objectives, so nobody had to miss that much work back at the ranch,” Sorrenti said.

In all, the initiative has involved more than 300 officials from 65 agencies. “We were able to have a good cross-section of people from all the agencies without hurting their own operations,” she said.

Her strategy proved successful. By 2004, IAE had met three of its five original objectives, according to a Government Accountability Office status report on e-government initiatives. Indeed, GAO pointed to IAE as “an example of effective collaboration” that had contributed to advancing the goals of the initiative.

Cultural hurdles

Sorrenti’s “ability to collaborate is unique,” Basile said. “It’s in her bones. She has a natural ability to break down barriers and replace them with a philosophy that promotes collaboration.”

A large part of the IAE challenge has been cultural—coaxing agencies out of their own procurement stovepipes—and not technical, Sorrenti said.

To meet common business needs under IAE, existing systems were leveraged, duplicative systems eliminated and new systems built. But the tough part was convincing agency officials to give up their own systems to create a governmentwide process, she said.

More news on related topics: Acquisition / Contracts, Management, IT Management



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