The General Service Administration's Networx contracting vehicle for telecommunications suffers from too much complexity, said Sanjeev "Sonny" Bhagowalia, GSA deputy associate administrator in the office of citizen services and innovative technologies.

GSA announced contract awards for the Networx vehicle exactly four years ago on the day Bhagowalia spoke and since then has struggled to convince agencies that they should shift their telecommunications contracts away from various extensions of the old FTS 2001 contract vehicle--although agency adoption has recently grown significantly. "We haven't reached 100 [percent], but we've reached pretty close," he said.

Bhagowalia spoke March 29 before an industry audience in Arlington, Va. assembled for an Industry Advisory Council network and telecommunications special interest group meeting. Before joining GSA in May 2010, he was co-chair of the Interagency Management Council, an advisory group of federal telecom officials.

GSA is already in the early stages of preparing a successor vehicle called Network Services 2020, or NS2020, and it will differ from Networx in some respects, he said.

"When you try to have too many CLINS and too many things that it becomes so complicated, you lose the very essence of what it was trying to solve," he said. CLINS are contract line item numbers, the services that contractors are supposed to provide under a contract.

Networx, for example, has a four CLINS for a 10 gigabyte mobile data access plan--one for an "Internet monthly recurring charge," another for "overage usage," one for "advanced monthly recurring charge," and another for "basic monthly recurring charge."

NS2020 will take as a guiding principle an approach of "easy in, easy out, do your thing, and move on," Bhagowalia said.

"That's the principle, and we lost that principle sometimes," he added.

For more:
- listen to Bhagowalia's March 29 talk
- look up telecom services in GSA's Networx CLIN finder

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