Commentary

Job one for the new TTS: Transactional Data Transformation Project

This week, Administrator Denise Turner Roth announced the creation of a third service, the Technology Transformation Service (TTS), joining GSA’s other two se...

Roger Waldron

May 6, 2016 12:47 pm

2 min read

This week, Administrator Denise Turner Roth announced the creation of a third service, the Technology Transformation Service (TTS), joining GSA’s other two services, the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) and the Public Building Service (PBS). The new service combines GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, the Presidential Innovation Fellows, and 18F.

According to Roth, the “new service will provide the foundation for our government’s digital transformation and also partner with other agencies to assist them in their own attempts to transform. … Creating the Technology Transformation Service builds a great foundation for the federal government’s modernization efforts.”

GSA sees the new service as an opportunity to “better deliver on our mission to provide the best value in real estate, acquisitions and technology to government and the American people.”

GSA’s industry partners share GSA’s goal of delivering best value in real estate, products, services, and solutions to government customers and the American people. Coalition members look forward to hearing more about TTS, in particular, its role in delivering best value to customer agencies, the metrics against which that value will be measured, as well as the organization’s vision for engagement with commercial technology firms, its philosophy regarding technology standards, and commitment to commercial practices and market competition.

It is only through such engagement and dialogue between GSA, TTS, and industry that we can work together effectively and efficiently in delivering best value to customer agencies and the American people.

To this end, the critical first priority for the TTS in supporting digital modernization government-wide should be a comprehensive data management modernization that facilitates the efforts of customer agencies to aggregate, manage, and analyze internally their respective transactional data.

A TTS-led “Transactional Data Transformation Project” (TDTP) first could focus on the transactional data elements that management believes may assist in improving acquisition planning and underlying requirements development.

Aside from accelerating the government’s effort to organize and understand the data it already possesses to improve decision-making, internally identifying, compiling, and managing each agency’s transactional data will assist the government’s implementation of Category Management without imposing on businesses of all sizes onerous, cost-intensive, non-commercial barriers to market participation.

The TDTP has the potential to be an investment in good government for all and is worthy of exploration. Coalition members look forward to a dialogue on this fundamental digital modernization opportunity for GSA, OMB, customer agencies, industry and the American people.