GSA to secure federal sites under HSPD-12
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The General Services Administration's Public Buildings Service will provide card readers that meet Homeland Security Presidential Directive-12 requirements at the entrances to all federal buildings.
The General Services Administration's Public Buildings Service will provide card readers that meet the requirements under Homeland Security Presidential Directive-12 at the entrance of all federal buildings.
John Sindelar, GSA's acting associate administrator in the Office of Governmentwide Policy, yesterday said PBS will coordinate with each building security committee to install outside access card readers once products that meet Federal Information Processing Standard-201-1 are approved.
'PBS will do a survey at the end of May to identify what they are looking at in terms of requirements,' Sindelar said at a luncheon sponsored by the Association for Federal Information Resources Management in Washington. 'Anything above the card readers at the entrance will have to go through the normal reimbursable request process with PBS.'
The PBS survey is one of two currently under way for HSPD-12. The Office of Management and Budget's Executive Steering Committee is analyzing how to roll out identification card enrollment centers at about 430 locations around the country to serve about 1.8 million federal workers, said Chris Niedermayer, Agriculture Department's associate CIO and chairman of the ESC.
'We are looking at what we have at these locations and what we need to purchase,' Niedermayer said. 'Very few are HSPD-12-compliant already. But we are asking who will run these centers? How long will it take to bring them up to speed? If we need to expand them to handle more employees, where will we do that?'
He added that agencies also will be asked in the next few weeks whether they are interested in becoming a shared-services provider for these services. Niedermayer said several already have expressed an interest.
'We know that we can reach 80 percent of the workforce in 120 cities and no employee will have to travel more than 25 miles,' he said.
Niedermayer said some of the other aspects of HSPD-12 such as ID management and card production are less advanced.
For ID management, the decision on how to handle this will not come until the end of June or early July once ESC has more information about how to deal with data and how to use the information held in the databases in the human resources offices.
He also said card production still is up in the air. ESC believes having two or three places produce cards for the entire government likely is the way to go, but there still are some questions that need to be answered.
A lot of this depends on how fast GSA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology can approve products and services.
Sindelar said GSA should have the requirements for the new Federal Supply Service schedule number ready in the next week or so.
'We had hoped to finish the requirements to refresh the schedule by May 12, but it will slip,' he said. 'We are close.'
Once the requirements are finished, GSA will issue the solicitation and companies with NIST- and GSA-approved products and services can submit offers to get on the schedule.
'We were shooting to release the schedule by the end of May, but it will probably slip into June,' he said. 'We are working with the Federal Acquisition Service to get the acquisition strategy done.'
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