Judith Zawatsky, assistant commissioner in the office of systems management at General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service, told Federal News Network in an interview posted Thursday about the efforts of GSA’s information technology team to address the issues following the transition from FedBizOpps to the cloud-based System for Award Management beta website.
Vendors and other users encountered infrastructure problems, slow load times and other issues during the first few days of the betaSAM.gov portal’s launch. To address such concerns, Zawatsky said GSA “had pre-positioned a team offsite of the operational team, the product owners, the product managers, our technical team with GSA IT and our customer service [experts] … They worked and went through the system constantly. They brought in some extra engineers, GSA IT was fabulous.â€
Despite the initial issues, she noted that more than 20K users visited the new portal in the first week, while agencies used the platform to post over 2K business opportunities.
Zawatsky said she and Dave Shive, chief information officer at GSA, will work with operational and technical teams to conduct a retrospective of the beta’s launch to figure out the causes of the problems and address potential concerns for future migrations.
