A pair of internal analyses by the General Services Administration finds much to criticize in the structure of federal telecommunications contract Networx, portraying it as too complex, inflexible and mismatched to the way agencies buy telecom services.
The Government Accountability Office has estimated that a protracted agency transition to Networx from the predecessor governmentwide telecommunications contract caused agencies to miss out on $329 million worth of savings and GSA to spend an extra $66.4 million on supporting it. In the end, the transition took three years longer than anticipated.
GSA provided the two reports – one from July 2012, another from September 2012 – after FierceGovernmentIT submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for them. Agency officials decided to release the documents independently of FOIA, and we withdrew the request after being promised the reports.
Among the observations the analyses make is that while GSA initially defined more than 50 telecom services for Networx, only six services account for more than 80 percent of business volume.
“Networx has thousands of contract line items and millions of service permutations,” the July 2012 report says. “It is no surprise that agencies indicate the Networx program is too complex.”
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