State begins plan for IT strategic sourcing acquisitions

The State Department is looking for new areas of IT suited for strategic sourcing, including enterprise desktop management tools and services.

The department’s bureaus that oversee information resource management, business and planning, governance, resources and performance management, and also sourcing management are considering new IT procurement vehicles. Their goals are reducing costs and shortening the time to complete procurements.

As the department develops an acquisition strategy, it plans to use industry’s input on requirement definitions and commercial availability, logical grouping for single or multiple competitions, social-economic set-asides, and the potential use of existing governmentwide contracts, among other areas.

Furthermore, as sourcing management officials search for enterprise desktop management tools and services, the department is asking industry to configure, manage, secure, and support desktops in physical, virtual and publishing environments. The department wants a focus on capabilities, such as data leak protection and control over devices and network resources, server/workstation management and monitoring, data modeling, performance monitoring, security information and event management, and mobile management, among other capabilities.

The State Department released the request for information May 13. Reponses are due May 27.