The Price of Complacency
How So Many Missed the Writing on the Wall
One of the most undeniable trends in the Federal contracting market over the past two decades has been the government’s continued adoption of task orders as the primary method for acquiring services. When taken in the aggregate, MAS, IDIQs, and GWACs have represented nearly all of the growth in major verticals within the market.
This isn’t recent, and it isn’t unexpected. It is now a clear government preference and there is nothing to suggest that trend will be curtailed or stall out. It is this last part that should make another trend alarming for every contractor operating within IT, Professional Services, and many other markets. Second-tier competitions offer the Government a faster pathway to fulfilling requirements, reduce risk, and remove the challenge of vetting contractors.
This is not a sudden shift or emerging trend. It has been an unmistakable progression for over two decades.
The result is a set of numbers that are difficult to ignore. 79, 75, 72, 65, 60 and 58%. This is the share of obligations captured by the top 10% of contractors on OASIS, OASIS SB, DTIC IAC, CIOSP 3 SB, Alliant and Alliant II. Or $143 billion of $208 billion that went to the top contractors. How could this be a multi-decade trend across nearly every major program if the overall shift has been so visible since the early 2000s? Did only some contractors see the trend, while others remained unaware? That is partially true. In truth, successful contractors saw the trend and changed their strategy and cultures to meet the market where it was going rather than standing pat and static, hoping what used to work would keep on winning.
If this happened on one or two vehicles it would be a deviation from the norm, but this trend has become the rule, and why it keeps happening, why vehicles are a boom town for some and an abject failure for most, is one that needs to be answered before this trend continues for a third decade.
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