GSA plans major overhaul of real estate management systems
Gettyimages.com/ Douglas Rissing
By
Nick Wakeman
A new sources sought notice seeks contractors who can consolidate multiple legacy platforms into an artificial intelligence-enabled solution that lives in a cloud environment.
The General Services Administration wants to undertake a major overhaul of how it manages the federal government's real estate portfolio by moving to a commercial, cloud-based offering..
In a new request for information posted Wednesday, GSA’s Public Building Service organization wants information from potential bidders who can provide the software-as-a-service solution.
The RFI describes several goals:
- Consolidate and streamline their current fragmented systems.
- Eliminate data silos and reduce duplicative manual data entry.
- Improve integration across the real estate lifecycle.
- Enhance automation of workflows and business processes.
- Improve analytics and decision making with artificial intelligence.
GSA currently uses a variety of solutions from vendors to support the real estate portfolio. The agency wants ideas on how a software-as-a-service platform would integrate with these technologies or replace them.
The real estate management lifecycle includes acquisition, leasing, space planning, facilities operations, project delivery, portfolio planning, customer engagement, compliance, market intelligence, financial operations and property disposal.
GSA's problem is that the solutions currently in place to support the lifecycle tend to operate in silos with little integration and require manual data entry across platforms, which create inefficiencies.
The current technology stack includes:
- IBM Maximo – building asset management and maintenance operations.
- IBM Tririga – real estate portfolio management, lease administration and capital project tracking.
- Kahua – project and construction management for capital improvements.
- Salesforce CRM – customer and stakeholder engagement.
- Appian – workflows supporting acquisitions and lease management.
- Databricks – enterprise data & analytics platform for unification, advanced analytics and AI/ML.
- BidHom – property disposal lifecycle and public auction management.
- ArcGIS – geospatial analysis and mapping of real estate assets.
The RFI also describes the future state GSA wants to reach that involves a SaaS-first, cloud native platform and an API-first architecture that should make everything connect seamlessly.
Other attributes include configurable workflows that are not custom-coded and unified data visibility, so there are no more data silos. The solution also must be FedRAMP compliant and support AI-enhanced decisions.
Responses are due Nov. 17 and should be limited to 15 pages. Respondents can also submit an optional 10-minute video demo.