The finalists for WashingtonExec’s 2023 Pinnacle Awards were announced Sept. 25, and we’ll be highlighting some of them until the event takes place live, in-person Nov. 16.
Next is Sagar Samant, acting chief information officer of the Federal Acquisition Service for the General Services Administration, and finalist in the Government Cloud Executive of the Year category. Here, he shares proud organizational moments and primary focus areas going forward.
What are you most proud of having been a part of in your current organization?
Within GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, I led a digital transformation to support our business line missions with value-driven outcomes, putting our users at the center of the technology modernization. I partnered with the FAS leadership to develop the COMET BPA, creating a vehicle to develop a modernization ecosystem enabling cloud, data, and security under the name FAS Cloud Services (FCS).
While I am very proud of all of our technology achievements, I’m most proud of what COMET and FCS have helped GSA achieve by serving as a force-multiplier offering shared, re-usable services for GSA’s most critical business transformation efforts.
For example, we launched GSAFleet.gov, creating a modern platform to manage the federal fleet from cradle-to-grave. We introduced a new buyer experience through buy.gsa.gov, a plain language, multi-function website delivering a new single starting point for all things federal buying. We increased transparency in the customer buying experience by incorporating supply chain disruption indicators across 10,000+ products in GSAAdvantage.
Through our partnership with FAS business leaders, these achievements enable a more modern, customer-centric experience for nearly 4,300 GSA employees and its global customers from across the federal government, DOD, state and local, and tribal and native nations.
What are your primary focus areas going forward, and why are those so important to the future of the nation?
Of course, we will continue evolving the efficiency and effectiveness of the technology services we provide to support GSA mission delivery. The next frontier for us to conquer is data activation. While leading the migration of over 60% of our systems portfolio to FCS, we invested significant energy into our Enterprise Data Strategy, which has positioned us to harness the true power of our data assets in applying AI / ML, data science, and analytical use cases for internal and external customers, including public access to data.
Now that we have democratized the data, we want to humanize the data-driven modernization and leverage AI enablers in a responsible, transparent manner. We’ve migrated 38 mission critical data sets into our enterprise data catalog, promoting more data-driven decision-making through transparency, accessibility, and automation.
In one success story, we require enhanced capabilities to identify, assess, mitigate, monitor, control, and share substantial supply chain risk information to thwart adversarial nations’ malicious objectives and protect the U.S. government’s supply chain.
GSA leveraged these capabilities to proactively evaluate vendor catalogs to identify non-compliant products and then issue modifications to have those products removed from the contract and catalog, ensuring customers can purchase safely and with confidence.