Inside the Shark Tank: The Enterprise License Biggie Bag

At the April All-Staff meeting, OIT leadership challenged employees to propose solutions that target opportunities for improvement. In this series, we are sharing brief summaries of the resulting proposals, playfully dubbed “shark tank pitches,” that your colleagues presented to the Front Office, with updates on their progress.

“What if ordering software at CMS were as simple as browsing the menu on the Wendy’s mobile app?” wonders Thomas Westley, a Contracting Officer’s Representative in the Division of Vendor Strategy and Management (DVSM). “You know exactly what your options are, and it doesn’t leave any room for confusion.” 

That’s the idea behind the pitch from "Team Just Do It.” This 7-person team proposed taking steps toward building a single source of truth for software licenses across CMS. 

Information about CMS software licenses is currently spread across several digital locations. A single site with a comprehensive inventory could streamline software acquisition for CMS employees while saving the agency money. 

For instance, if multiple teams across the agency use the same software on different contracts, maybe it would make more sense to purchase an enterprise license. Or staff might be able to take advantage of existing licenses that they didn’t know about, thereby precluding any additional purchases. 

DVSM already maintains the Enterprise Software Licensing intranet site, with information about nine – and soon to be 10 – software contracts that anyone at CMS can use to purchase software. With little additional overhead, this site could become the seed of a more comprehensive, user-friendly site. 

For software licenses that aren’t managed by DVSM, the enhanced site would identify appropriate points of contact.

Eventually, it could also help users to decide which tools to use. For example, somebody looking for business intelligence software could compare the different features offered by Tableau and MicroStrategy in a side-by-side view.

For now, the team is reaching out to other CMS components to compile information about licenses and identify potential collaborators. They are confining their initial efforts to the nine OIT-managed enterprise software agreements, but are looking to bring on additional software contracts, and other contracts with which software can be purchased, in the future. 

“We’re not trying to conquer the world,” says DVSM Director Michael Crow. “But we’d like to see if we can expand our current SharePoint intranet site to other enterprise contracts the rest of the agency can use.”

If you have any questions about this pitch, Crow can be reached at michael.crow@cms.hhs.gov. But before you ask, no, software orders will not be accompanied by fries and a Coke.

Team Members: Michael Crow, Van Showell, John Kuebel, Richard Hebbel, Stephanie Clark, Thomas Westley, Ricco Jenkins