State Gives Vendors a Heads-Up on Procurement Modernization

Procurement changes are being made by the California Department of Technology and the Department of General Services. Angela Shell, DGS' deputy director of procurement, spelled out the changes Friday at the CDT Vendors Forum.

"We've been working for the last two years with our partners at CDT to make sure we're modernizing our methods at both our procurement shops," Shell said at the event.



Things that are not changing in procurement:

• Procurement methods have not changed. 
• Leveraged procurement agreements will still be used. 
• Procurement staff will still look at CDT's tools for procurement on IT projects. 
• DGS will still accredit state departments for procurement authority, with CDT's input.

 Things that are changing in procurement:

• Updates to the state contracting manual are coming. 
• Standard 213 forms are being consolidated between IT and non-IT services, allowing for electronic signatures. 
• A non-competitively bid portal was announced by CDT and DGS in September, and full implementation is expected in June 2019. 
• Implementation services cost can be included in software licensing program (SLP) procurements; and it does not have to be 50 percent of the software purchase price. 
• Software-as-a-Service general provisions changes are coming; comments are due by Tuesday.
• FedRAMP moderate options are available for infrastructure as a service and platform as a service.
• An automated vendor application for qualification is coming but many are grandfathered in. 

"We want to give our departments flexibility to bring in what they need to accommodate their business," Shell said. "One caveat: With that flexibility, we want to maintain our oversight goal, and so we'll be checking back with departments to make sure they're not using the implementation services for things that are not related to SLP." 

Marlon Paulo, deputy director of statewide technology procurement at CDT, asked all vendors to make comments on the department's software-as-a-service policies.

Upcoming contracts include:

• Storage, servers, networking and routers. 
• A statewide telemetry contract; vendors had questions about services, security and interfaces. 
• Public safety video systems. 
• Drones as a service. 
• Renewals on copiers, printers and similar devices. 
• Renewals on data communications management services. 
• Online auction services. 
• Software, value-added, resellers contract. 
• Cellular voice and data. 

CDT Chief Deputy Director Chris Cruz outlined some of the goals behind the department's "One IT Community" movement.

"We're looking at the online security posture, we're looking at the standardization of the state's IT infrastructure, we're looking at all the digital services that we share statewide," Cruz said.

He included counties in the "IT village" and the efforts to make California a smart state.

"Customers drive our priorities," Cruz said, including cities and counties in the IT efforts.