In 1972, the U.S. Congress established the Federal Computer Performance Evaluation and Simulation Center at the
General Services Administration (GSA) with the goal of providing expertise in computer performance evaluation and modeling to other Government agencies for a fee. GSA delegated the organization to the
U.S. Air Force Data Automation Agency as GSA’s executive agent. FEDSIM is funded by fees paid by its customer agencies rather than an appropriated budget. Initially, most FEDSIM projects supported the Air Force,
Army,
Navy, and other
Defense Department agencies. Subsequently, FEDSIM’s clients have come to include all cabinet-level departments, many independent agencies like the
Environmental Protection Agency and
NASA, small U.S. Government offices, both houses of
Congress, and the
Judicial Branch. In its early years, FEDSIM supported about a dozen projects with about ten staff members; this has subsequently grown to more than two thousand projects in total, and in 2019 a staff of 246. FEDSIM’s annual revenue has grown from $1 million in the early 1970s to about $20 million in the mid 80’s and over $1 billion since the turn of the millennium. FEDSIM now outsources most of the work and has expanded its business lines from computer performance evaluation to include anything in information technology (IT) plus professional services. FEDSIM's increasing reliance on the private sector is consistent with the current Government policy of contracting out tasks that are not an "Inherently Governmental Function". FEDSIM’s roles have evolved from technical analysis using internal computer performance experts during its first 20 years to award and administration of external contracts, financial management, and project management support for its agency customers during the last 20 years. The
U.S. Navy established the Federal Conversion Support Center around the same time that GSA created FEDSIM. Because of Government regulations, agencies often needed to open their computer acquisitions to a variety of manufacturers; the Conversion Support Center analyzed the cost to convert software from one vendor architecture to another in that situation. The Conversion Support Center transferred to GSA in 1979 and became the core of GSA’s Office of Software Development and Information Technology (OSDIT). Like FEDSIM, OSDIT provided technical experts to other agencies for a fee. In 1985, because of the small number of its Air Force-specific projects, FEDSIM transferred from the Air Force back to GSA. FEDSIM and OSDIT merged in 1990. As outsourcing became more prevalent in U.S. Government IT shops, FEDSIM created, awarded and administered contracts for IT services such as
disaster recovery,
local area networks, and
data center outsourcing.
System Integration has been FEDSIM’s single most important business area in the last 20 years. In 1987, FEDSIM was renamed the Federal Systems Integration and Management Center to reflect this change. FEDSIM projects during the 70s and 80s included designing and optimizing agencies’ national data communications networks; simulation of the performance of a major weapons system; sizing and estimating the cost of creating a new agency data center; purchasing mainframe computers for client agencies; and many others. Large and long-running FEDSIM projects from the 80s and up to the present have included IT support of ADNET, a multi-agency Anti-Drug Network; development of the
Internal Revenue Service’s Electronic Filing system
E-file; purchase of scientific computers for the
National Institutes of Health; program management support to
JIDA, the Defense Department’s Joint Improvised-threat Defeat Agency; and multi-faceted system integration projects for the
Agency for International Development, the
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and others. As of 2015, FEDSIM's largest contracting vehicle, valued at $6 billion, supports the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS's)
Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program to provide IT Security software and hardware tools and services for continuous protection of civilian agency networks and systems from cyberattack. FEDSIM’s leaders have gone on to become Assistant Commissioners, Commissioners, directors of the Government’s largest data centers, independent consultants, and in senior leadership positions in the industry. ==Organization==