This week’s resignation of General Services Administration (GSA) chief Lurita Doan is the latest chapter in what has been a dynamic yet turbulent career spanning high profile work in the private and public sector.

Though the White House ended Doan’s tenure this week, it appears that the saga might continue for at least a few more days. Doan was a guest on Federal News Radio this morning, where she provided some additional detail on how her curtain call went down. Also, according to Federal Computer Week’s Christopher J. Dorobek, there may be some other interesting elements to the story as well.

(more…)

On the heels of a Federal judge early March ruling in favor of a handful of contractors who protested not being awarded a piece of the General Service Adminstration’s Alliant contract, the GSA let it be known things wouldn’t be resolved anytime soon.

Rather than open a can of worms by folding the eight protesting contractors into Alliant without addressing other losing bidders, the GSA opted to take a step back and re-evaluate all 62 bids for the 10-year, $50 billion governmentwide acquisition contract. After satisfying the Judge’s ruling in how it evaluates the bidders, GSA will, at some point later this year, award the contract a second time to an undetermined subset of the 62 bidders.

For those who lost out the first time around, a second chance to land the fish that got away. For the initial Alliant winners - uncertainty. After months of work submitting the bid and then building a strategy to execute once announced as a winner, these contractors have to put these plans on hold and enter wait-and-see mode.

While the wait will be excruciating, the GSA knows that rushing the process will not result in an outcome that satisfies any interested party, be they winners, losers, or, most importantly, the judge.

“If you had 15 minutes alone with President Bush, what is the one critical issue you would bring to his attention?” Now, that might have been a dicey proposition for the POTUS if asked at a different D.C. venue today, but in the context of the ExecutiveBiz CIO Series Event held this morning at the WestWood Country Club in Vienna, Virginia, the question was a very good one.

The hypothetical was posed by the event’s moderator Barry West, Executive Vice President of SE Solutions. West asked the two featured speakers - Casey Coleman, CIO of the General Services Administration, and Venkatapathi (P.V.) Puvvada, VP and CTO of UNISYS - what critical Federal IT issue they would bring to the President’s attention if given 15 minutes of his time. Coleman deftly deferred to P.V., who said he would focus on the supply chain problem that exists in terms of available talent, and how there is a critical need to educate and attract highly-skilled IT workers.

(more…)

Interested in learning more about the Government IT space? Then, mark your calendars: On Wednesday, March 19, Casey Coleman will speak at ExecutiveBiz’s Government IT series. Coleman was named Chief Information Officer for U.S. General Services Administration this past fall — the first woman in GSA’s history to hold that position.

Founded in 1949, GSA manages more than one-fourth of the government’s total procurement dollars and influences the management of $500 billion in federal assets, including 8,300 government-owned or leased buildings and 205,000 vehicles. It only takes a cursory look at statistics to see just how unique Coleman’s role is at GSA: The 2006 Census of Women Corporate Officers, Top Earners, and Directors of the Fortune 500 found that women held just 15.6 percent of corporate officer positions in 2006.

(more…)