OPM cancels sole-source Workday contract for HR system overhaul
Gettyimages.com/ phattharachai Rattanachaiwong
By
Nick Wakeman
The White House's workforce modernization push faces delays as the Office of Personnel Management likely will return to a more traditional procurement approach.
The Office of Personnel Management’s plan to go directly to Workday for a comprehensive human capital management system has come to an unceremonious end now that the agency has cancelled that sole-source contract .
OPM went through a quick sole-source justification process before announcing its pick of Workday on May 2.
Part of the agency’s reasoning was the need to meet very tight deadlines set by the White House to restructure the federal workforce and implement merit-based hiring reforms.
OPM said its current systems could not handle the volume of work that would come from simultaneous layoffs, retirements and new hires.
Workday would bring in a scalable cloud-based system that many commercial enterprises have adopted. Several other federal agencies have as well, including the Energy Department and Defense Intelligence Agency.
The contract was directly with Workday, which has apparently raised the ire of systems integrators that generally lead this kind of work on implementing new technology solutions. OPM's process went around traditional prime contractors.
“They (integrators) raised a fit,” one industry source told us.
Workday likely would have hired one or more integrators to help implement its solution by the July 15 deadline. But the sole-source contract's structure put the software company in charge of the project instead of an integrator.
A second source expressed surprise that the project was derailed so quickly because of the high-level interest and the rhetoric at the White House and the Department of Government Efficiency around the desire for commercial solutions and non-traditional government contractors.
The Workday contract was cancelled with a single line in the Sam.gov notice: “This justification is being cancelled in its entirety.”
The LinkedIn reaction so far is mixed. Many in industry simply repeated the news that broke on Friday with the Sam.gov notice.
John Weiler, executive director and co-founder of the IT Acquisition Advisory Council, welcomed the news by calling it a “flawed HR sole source” contract.
Because the Workday award was still open to protests at the Government Accountability Office, OPM likely pulled back to avoid that process.
OPM has avoided a protest delay, but will certainly not make the July 15 deadline to have a new system in place.
The question remains where OPM goes from here, if indeed its current human capital systems cannot handle the workload.
OPM may have to follow the process it was trying to avoid – conduct a traditional competition process. In its justification for the Workday award, OPM said that the traditional route would take between six and nine months. OPM claimed could not have waited that long if it wanted to meet the July 15 deadlines.
One strategy going forward could be an open competition among the systems integrators but with a stipulation that they implement the Workday platform. Or they could conduct a competition that doesn’t mandate the use of Workday, which would allow the integrators to pitch other solutions.
A Workday spokesman told Washington Technology that the company "remains committed to supporting the federal government with its HR modernization efforts.”
OPM officials didn't respond to a request for comment.