BAE moves to new IT service model with Treasury win

“Probably the most important objective,” Sechler said, “which is exactly opposite from normal commodity, commercial-based objectives, is that we design for extreme flexibility and extreme scalability. Those are the points that government demands and very rarely gets out of IT managed services.”For example, when Treasury created the new Office of Financial Stability to administer the Troubled Asset Relief Program, BAE focused on being flexible enough to meet customer needs, Sechler said. “The foundations, the amount of bandwidth and redundancy, resiliency and capacity and the underlying solution are already there,” he said. “So we can take it in amazing directions without straining. That’s the power of managed services.”Without commenting on this specific contract, said Stan Soloway, president of the Professional Services Council and a Washington Technology columnist, “there is in general an evolution in the whole IT space, not just seat management, toward more integrated solutions,” with the expectation that they will deliver more effective solutions, significant economies in scale and greater flexibility.The flexibility of BAE’s managed services for Treasury expands to include new technology, Sechler said. A virtual model office lets agency managers see how changes in technology could affect their workplace. An e-commerce-like Web site lets customers place specialized orders that BAE delivers in days with no paper involved.“We believe we’ve created a custom version of managed services based on the best practices of seat management and commercial IT models — but really beefed up, tailored to the federal market and customized to each customer,” Sechler said.To Soloway, it all sounds “not unlike some things that have been tried in the defense arena with lead systems integrators in which you have one contractor that’s responsible for ensuring that all the others perform.”Like those efforts, he said, “it requires good strong management on the government side and, no matter how good a relationship you may have, protections written into the contract on both sides so if things start to go south, you have some options.”With 10 years together — Treasury Seat Management began in October 1999 and expires this October — BAE and Treasury likely know each other well, and, Sechler said they have rigorous agreements with penalties and incentives built in.“But even with incentives and protections built in, you’re wise to also have some capacity to maintain some competition so that the pencils remain sharp,” Soloway said.BAE has no problem with that, Sechler said. “We believe that this is going to be a model that not only will Treasury be ecstatic about but also that it’ll be one that we’ll ultimately have a lot of success with.”