Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Introducing the Insider
The Industry Defined
HUBZones: Anyone Can Play
Beyond Reproach: The Incumbent's Bind
Breaking Wave: Human Resources BPO
Cooperative Personnel Services: Differentiating Not a Problem
Adventures in Marketing
Policy & Regs: Can We Satisfy the Appetite for Cleared Personnel?
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Posted on November 4
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We've had the feeling that government services industry firms are looking, thinking, and acting more alike as time goes by. Several factors, such as regulation, contribute to this "commoditization." We wanted to confirm what we've been seeing and gauge the impacts. We talked with industry experts with an unusually good vantage point.
If you wonder where to place your IT investment bets, it wouldn't be a bad idea to follow The Carlyle Group and like private equity firms. But, hey, they've already staked out the emerging IPv6 "market" for applications and solutions that exploit the newest Internet protocol.
We talked with David Kriegman, president of Command Federal, funded by Carlyle and two other firms, to capture the business in the federal space. This kind of investment is not for everyone.
It's taken almost two years for GSA to formulate and get all approvals to establish the Federal Acquisition Service. Alan Chvotkin analyzes its prospects for success and how long that might take. As a result, he gives you ideas to hedge your bets if things don't gel at GSA.
The government announced last month that Oracle will hand over more than $95 million in settling a suit that alleged PeopleSoft, recently acquired by Oracle, used faulty pricing and discount data in a GSA schedule contract. You can learn something about due diligence and people issues in a strained environment that might crop up in other cases.
While we would expect Congressman Henry Waxman to levitate upon learning of "55 percent overhead" in an audited Iraq reconstruction contract, we'll give him a pass because of his well known blind spots. We were, however, somehow surprised that some media outlets conveyed similar surprise at the proportion of indirect costs that come with labor in a government services contract.