Just when you thought government contracting was about to get fun, again, the General Services Administration decided boring is the right approach.
That’s right, I’m saying government procurement and fun in the same sentence because we had an upcoming contract that had so many possibilities intertwined with it. GSA has been planning the follow-on to its highly popular and successful OASIS contract for the past year. It started by calling the vehicle BIC MAC—best-in-class multiple award contract. Oh the possibilities there!
The agency moved to Services MAC for the last few months. And with both of those names, unlike its more traditional and unexciting names like Alliant or Millennial or 8(a) STARS, these names had so much potential for fun in headlines and leads and so much more.
But GSA decided — and I’ll blame the lawyers here, only because it’s always fun to blame lawyers — to pick the name OASIS+, or maybe Oasis-Plus, for the new governmentwide contract, ending any real chance of bringing fun back to federal procurement.
“The name echoes a successful brand that our customers have come to know and trust, reflects the expanded scope of services that will be available through the new program, and embodies the contract’s flexible domain-based structure,” wrote Tiffany Hixson, the assistant commissioner in GSA’s Office of Professional Services and Human Capital Categories in the Federal Acquisition Service, in a blog post from June 15. “The new program will have a broad scope. As their respective ordering periods conclude, the new program will be able to fulfill requirements currently met by GSA’s One Acquisition Solution for Integrated Services (OASIS); Human Capital and Training Solutions (HCaTS); and Building, Maintenance, and Operations (BMO) contracts. In addition, new scope areas include environmental, intelligence services, and large enterprise solutions. Plus, we’ll build-in the flexibility to expand scope as customers identify new federal services needs.”
All kidding aside to the good folks at GSA, the decision around OASIS+/Oasis-Plus is seems small, but important. It’s clear there is recognition in FAS that the current contract is popular, in part because GSA has spent the better part of a decade promoting, creating a brand and working with everyone from the Air Force to the Homeland Security Department to the Army to commit to putting hundreds of millions of dollars through OASIS.
Since 2015, agencies have spent $48.8 billion on OASIS, OASIS small business and OASIS 8(a) through more than 3,200 task orders.