Sad news in the federal acquisition community: Scott Orbach, co-founder and president of EZGSA, suddenly died while on vacation in Hawaii.

Orbach had led EZGSA since 1990 and helped it become one of the leading companies that helps firms get their General Services Administration’s schedule contracts. EZGSA also assists companies in generating leads and sales, and helping clients win federal contracts.

According to the Honolulu Advertiser, Orbach, 53, was found unconscious in Waimea Bay and the medical examiner determined the cause of death to be drowning.

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The National Security Agency’s retention rates of its employees are heads and tails above nearly every other agency and private sector organization, but that doesn’t mean people don’t leave.

And NSA is losing a longtime fed to retirement. Debora Plunkett, NSA’s first senior adviser for equality, retired in January after more than 31 years in government.

According to her LinkedIn page, Plunkett continues to teach cybersecurity at the University of Maryland.

The director of equality was a new role for Plunkett and the agency. Adm. Mike Rogers, NSA director, named her to the position in September 2014, where she focused on developing and overseeing a model to ensure equality in the agency.

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The Office of Management and Budget is planning to turn up the heat once again on agency commodity IT spending. First it was on desktops and laptops, and now it will be on mobile devices.

In last week’s notebook, I told you about a new mobile IT services policy in the works. Now I have a copy  of the draft policy, and OMB wants to apply the same level of oversight and structure to how agencies buy mobile devices and services as they did for desktops and laptops.

The draft policy tells agencies “effective immediately, except as provided in this policy, all agencies are prohibited from issuing solicitations for new contract awards for mobile device [sic] and services, and should look to the existing governmentwide General Services Administration wireless solution.”

OMB plans to give agency chief information officers until Sept. 30, 2018 to consolidate existing contracts for mobile devices and services to have one contract per carrier. Under the draft policy, agencies must develop transitions plans to the consolidated governmentwide contract by Aug. 31, including outlining potential situations where this initiative may not work, such as remote locations.

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The General Services Administration’s choice to create a blanket purchase agreement for Salesforce cloud integration and support services on the surface seems logical.

It’s a widely used platform — according to a simple search on USASpending.gov website there have been 227 contracts worth more than $61 million since fiscal 2011— and one that needs more structure and control across government.

“The marketplace for Salesforce implementation and integration services was fragmented and had some disparity in there,” said David Shive, GSA’s chief information officer during a press call on Jan. 20. “When we looked, we saw there were no established quality standards for Salesforce development. We saw there were inexperienced vendors that were winning with new Salesforce customers, but sometimes had some dubious results coming out from those inexperienced vendors. We saw there was inconsistent delivery of code and configuration from agency to agency. There was failed implementations that was negatively impacting adoption of the tools and the processes surrounding those tools. And we saw that some vendors were rebuilding the same apps for the same agency and were developing closed systems in an otherwise open environment.”

GSA announced the award of the BPA to six vendors in December. The five-year contract has a ceiling of $503 million.

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Federal chief information officers are like Howard Beale, the fictional TV newscaster from the movie Network who famously said: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” after his newscast is cancelled for poor ratings.

CIOs aren’t being cancelled because of poor ratings—though if the data on the IT Dashboard was more accurate maybe some should.

Rather, CIOs are done with the CPIC process. It is the bane of many CIOs’ budget existence. If you aren’t familiar, let me describe: the capital planning and investment control (CPIC) process is an annual description of technology projects and programs and all the associated data that goes with them — cost, schedule and performance metrics, current and future cybersecurity status and a whole lot more. The fiscal 2017 guidance was 45 pages and included such wonderful things as the CIO’s evaluation of the program, the total estimated life cycle costs — which is nearly impossible to estimate for almost any and all program, whether IT or not — and a description and associated data to create a major IT business case for the program.

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House lawmakers began the process earlier this month of reauthorizing the Small Business Administration. While much of the Defending America’s Small Contractors Act of 2016 (H.R. 4341) is routine, several interesting provisions are worth highlighting.

One of the most significant provisions is the extension of the ability of vendors to protest task orders worth more than $10 million. The current law will sunset in September, leaving only the Defense Department with this authority.

The extension of this authority is important because more and more federal procurement dollars are going through these types of contracts.

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The government rarely gets credit for listening and hearing when industry is concerned. But the Federal Risk Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) for cloud cybersecurity services deserves credit for doing more than just giving lip service to long-standing vendor complaints.

Most of industry’s concerns center on the speed of the approval process by the Joint Authorization Board (JAB), which many vendors believe is the “gold standard.” On average, contractors are waiting 12 to 15 months to get a JAB approval. Currently, eight cloud service providers (CSPs) are awaiting final approval, but dozens of others are in the queue to get to that last step.

Matt Goodrich, the director of FedRAMP, has heard the complaints and is doing something about it. He said he too is concerned about the timeline to get JAB approval. To that end, Goodrich said one of the program office’s main goals for 2016 is to talk to and hear from its customers.

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Like an archaeological dig where each layer of earth provides new discoveries, the update of cross-agency priority goals on Performance.gov is a treasure trove of progress and new expectations.

This week, I broke through the category management layer and found the Office of Management and Budget’s 2016 to-do list growing.

In addition to new policies on data center consolidation and open source that I reported on last week, OMB’s e-gov office and Office of Federal Procurement Policy will issue guidance on IT software and on IT mobile services.

Anne Rung, OFPP administrator, and Tony Scott, the federal chief information officer, issued a draft policy in late December to try, once again, to better manage the $9 billion agencies spend annually on software licenses.

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A couple of interesting changes in the federal IT community took place over the last week or so.

First off, Greg Garcia is moving over to become the Army Corps of Engineers’ new chief information officer. Garcia comes to the Corps of Engineers after spending the last three-plus years leading the Army IT Agency.

Garcia replaces Robert Kazimer, who left in December to take a new job in the organization.

The move to the Army Corps of Engineers is an interesting one for Garcia, who starts in late January.

Garcia has been running the Army IT Agency, which is an enterprise service provider for the Pentagon and others in the Washington, D.C. area. He led the ITA’s efforts to provide IT and communications services.

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Call it the HealthCare.gov effect, as cloud computing seems to have caught the attention of Capitol Hill.

When a dramatic failure happens, lawmakers spend a lot of time and energy trying to find out the reason for the failure — of course never looking in the mirror for the root cause of most problems. And then, members of Congress start to listen more intently to industry and agency experts.

The latest case in point is a second bill out for discussion that will make it easier for agencies to buy commercial cloud services.

The Senate IT working group, led by staff members of Sens. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) offices, have put out to industry a discussion draft to improve the cloud cybersecurity program known as the Federal Risk Authorization and Management program (FedRAMP), create a fund run by the General Services Administration to pay for agency cloud implementations and transitions, and requiring better agency inventories of legacy systems that could be candidates to move to the cloud.

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