“Buried in an Aug. 27 blog post on identity management by Bill Zielinski, the General Services Administration’s assistant commissioner for the Office of Information Technology Category (ITC) in the Federal Acquisition Service, is a nugget of important news.”
“GSA announced that the Veterans Affairs Department is moving its smart card identity management program to its USAccess shared service.”
“By finally convincing VA to be a customer, GSA is almost doubling the number of customers using its identity credentialing service. Nearly 14 years after GSA launched the managed service, USAccess finally snagged its white whale, so to speak.”
“’This was a decision I wish I had made when I was there,’ said Roger Baker, the former VA chief information officer during the Obama administration. ‘This was an ongoing project that never caused as much pain that the decision had to be made. VA decided to do its own PIV card system and that was a very complex and massive program. Anything at VA is like that because of the scale.’”
“And it’s that scale that makes this newsworthy, especially at a time when the Trump administration is strongly encouraging shared services and some agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services are pulling back their shared services offerings, and the Interior Department is considering a similar move…” Read the full article here.
Source: VA’s decision to move to GSA’s smart card shared service was a long-time in coming – By Jason Miller, September 17, 2019. Federal News Network.
