The team’s final product GS Agility ended up winning the grand prize and I love the idea of a marketplace for filling procurements under the $3,000 credit card threshold.
I’ve been thinking about procurement a lot lately so I reached out to the creator Seph and asked him a few questions – my questions and his answers are below:
What do you see as the biggest challenges with the procurement process?
Time & Burden Factor – I think the most immediate challenge with procurement is the time it takes to get from recognizing a need to final delivery. Even if agencies manage to get the budget and resources they need, they may not have the required lead time for procurements that are critical for their mission. Budgets and support contracts are often locked in way in advance of a mission change or new mandate, and acquiring something quickly may sacrifice (more time consuming) open competition and reduce the chance the most possible vendors to compete for business. Worse, agencies may just ignore a policy or opportunity because of the burden of the procurement cycle.
Proper Measures – While we work to increase speed we also need to make sure that the proper measures are still taken to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse. To accomplish all of these goals requires a change in the way we approach procurement that takes full advantage of the capabilities that web platforms offer.
Where can technology innovation help fit in?
Web Platforms – Web platforms are excellent at bringing together vendor capacity with customer demand by reducing the barriers and information gaps between the two. Portals like GSA eBuy and GSA Advantage and are a great start in the right direction, but I believe we can go even further. We should be able to provide a full web marketplace experience for government that delivers goods and services at the speed citizens require.
Government needs web platforms that facilitate the entire procurement process end to end – solicitations, bids, responses, awards, comments, and payment. An end to end platform would provide visibility on all transactions and permit auditors to see patterns and better prevent fraud. It also provides open access to opportunities for easy bidding and payment which increases the speed for an open competition and the diversity of responses. Faster. Simpler. More transparent.
What’s role of gov’t creating the innovation vs 3rd parties (like gsagility.com vs a standard .gov site)
Role of Private Sector and role of Acquisition Data – Private sector parties like FedBid and our own venture GSAgility can lead the way by building marketplace platforms within existing policies and rules, but to really revolutionize procurement the government can also help by using the data these portals generate to innovate with policy. An example might be data-driven, iterative policy “experiments” for instance whether raising purchase card limits or changing competition rules to suit web-based platforms results in better speed and value to government. Down the road, government and industry might also cooperate more closely through partnership agreements or by paying to operate purpose-built marketplaces as a service.