86 votes
build repositories to share market research across gov't
every day people in government are re-duplicating the same market research. there should be repositories to share market research amongst all levels of government.
About the Better Buy Project/Frequently Asked Questions
- Why the Federal Acquisition Process?
- What Topics Are At Issue?
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Why the Federal Acquisition Process?
On his first day in office, President Obama challenged leaders in government to "use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector." The acquisition process represents one of the most important areas of collaboration between government and the private sector.
Unfortunately, it is also among the most complex and least transparent. The Better Buy Project is an experiment dedicated to the belief that there's a lot of room for improvement in the way government buys products and services. We're testing this hypothesis by asking for your ideas on how to make acquisition process more open, transparent and collaborative.
The best part of this project is that the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) GSA would really like to adopt some of your best ideas. Promising ideas will be selected by GSA to be piloted on an upcoming acquisition, where lessons learned will be captured for future implementation. But that really depends on us, and the ideas we're able to produce.
What Topics Are At Issue?
This project is concerned primarily with the pre-contract-award stages of the acquisition process—the activities that take place before the government "signs on the dotted line" to buy a product or service. Those areas are:
- Market Research and Requirements Definition Phase—Includes publicizing agency needs and requirements, and refining them based on further input and research about current capabilities.
- Pre-Solicitation Phase—Includes web-based research, discussions with other federal agencies, meetings and open discussion forums with the private sector to discuss potential solutions, and requests for information soliciting input and ideas. The requirements are also further refined at this stage in the process.
- Solicitation Phase—Includes the government notifying the private sector of the requirement through various channels such as E-Buy and FedBizOpps, holding open forums to discuss the requirement and answer questions (e.g., Industry Days), a review of the solicitation by interested companies, the written exchange between government and the private sector of questions, answers and clarifications on government requirements, and proposal submissions.
The ultimate goal is to improve how government learns about and chooses what it buys—in other words, to make government a more informed, more effective consumer.
What Kind of Feedback Are You Looking For?
We are looking for ideas to make federal acquisition more open, transparent, and collaborative. What does that mean?
- Open—Raise awareness of upcoming needs government is trying to fulfill, in order to assemble a pool of qualified providers who can compete on specific requirements.
- Transparent—Give the public and interested parties timely data on upcoming and ongoing buying activities, with the goal of promoting fair and high-quality competitions.
- Collaborative—Find ways for the government to engage in more ‘open’ conversations with the private sector on topics such as best practices, emerging technologies and innovations, and market conditions.
We believe that making the process more open, transparent and collaborative will make government more likely to end up with the right item at the right price.
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Joel Worst
More replicated content just means more infrastructure, applications, interfaces, newly funded mgmt groups, data input error and people forced to use it. Also personal judgment calls on what goes in, and what doesn't. As You put it, Mr. Tuttle, the differing needs of divisions within organizations within Agencies can't know what any other Agency entities would consider useful. Plus, requiring Your personnel to manually access one more application to post dumb data that just sits waiting for someone to... more
More replicated content just means more infrastructure, applications, interfaces, newly funded mgmt groups, data input error and people forced to use it. Also personal judgment calls on what goes in, and what doesn't. As You put it, Mr. Tuttle, the differing needs of divisions within organizations within Agencies can't know what any other Agency entities would consider useful. Plus, requiring Your personnel to manually access one more application to post dumb data that just sits waiting for someone to manually search and pull it isn't collaboration or knowledge transfer. It turns into something more like "what You're going to find out, is all I'm going to tell You".
*Proposal: Automating content awareness based on its metadata and its evolving context based use is one approach. Software data integration frameworks [not data fusion, cuz we don't want new infrastructure, systems, and training for personnel(COST)] can automate data discovery and awareness real-time delivering only metadata (info about content) so the created data always lives with its creator(best data integrity). The framework builds a single automated intelligent real-time information space of discoverable content through extending the reachable self-healing network to infinite nodes in each of their differing domains. Automated smart push/pull brings content to one's attention based on their specific need, role, or mission. If this content is used in that specific situation, the metadata is automatically updated. This provides greater context (what the content means to probable users) and is now smart push/pulled based on new profile needs requiring that knowledge. And then the Terminator said "I'll be Back"… WOW. Sorry for the rant. This is the field in which I work. And I tell You the problem with Transparency is, it isn't. Even when that's the first order of business or mandate, at some point it's always gonna get to "what You're going to find out, is all I'm going to tell You".
Thoughts?
LLevandowski
If market research information was also tied to Past Performance data, you would get something akin to a Government "Angie's List"; that woud have direct benefits to the Government. As mentioned by the posters, IGCE development, price negotiation and refinement of requirements would very quickly show a positive benefit.
Mike Derrios
I agree that market research is largely duplicated. It is also, especially with acquisition programs vs. procurement, largely ineffective. That's why I made a recommendation to use a crowd-sourcing portal for market research purposes.
Owen Ambur
It is good to see reference to DoD's Techipedia in this thread. The CIOC's ET.gov site and process were also set up to serve this purpose. See http://et.gov/
Noel Dickover
This is in essence the reason DoDTechipedia (and crowdsourcing component, DefenseSolutions.gov) was created. Market research should be a shared responsibility both govt-wide in collaboration with Industry. The format should be a modified wiki-based where everyone is responsible for maintaining currency in the state of the art technologies we care about.
Chris Hamm
Rather than performing actual market research, I see that a lot of government project managers and contracting officers rely on the contract vehicles and the market themselves. Why bother to research when you know that the competitive process will produce a quote / bid that will answer the mail.
I think that this suggestion is tied to another one. If the Government used a standard workflow for acquisition, and standard system, this would be a natural by-product. As an analogy, when you go to eBay.c... more
Rather than performing actual market research, I see that a lot of government project managers and contracting officers rely on the contract vehicles and the market themselves. Why bother to research when you know that the competitive process will produce a quote / bid that will answer the mail.
I think that this suggestion is tied to another one. If the Government used a standard workflow for acquisition, and standard system, this would be a natural by-product. As an analogy, when you go to eBay.com or amazon.com, you can search for the current market price of any particular item. The massive number of items and transactions create the market research.
Dennis D. McDonald
I think the value of such sharing will depend a lot on what you mean by "market research." Sharing information relative to commodity type products and services will differ quite a bit from sharing information relevant to specialized products or services that don't necessarily compare across different markets. Also, if the definition of "market research" is limited to "information about the market and its requirements," I'd be careful about sharing information in situations w... more
I think the value of such sharing will depend a lot on what you mean by "market research." Sharing information relative to commodity type products and services will differ quite a bit from sharing information relevant to specialized products or services that don't necessarily compare across different markets. Also, if the definition of "market research" is limited to "information about the market and its requirements," I'd be careful about sharing information in situations where there is a lot of variability over time; some market research may become obsolete very quickly. Finally, make sure you have the legal or contractual rights to share or redistribute market research purchased from commercial vendors.
Peter G. Tuttle, CPCM
Not only is market research duplicated, but duplicate services and supplies are purchased. This is understandable since each agency has its own set of needs, etc. but some type of information repository which federal buyers could use for market research and negotiation/disussion purposes would be a very powerful tool. Years ago, when I was a Contracting Officer for a federal agency, we had a card file (OK, I'm dating myself) which every buyer could access to see what other buyers paid for the same supp... more
Not only is market research duplicated, but duplicate services and supplies are purchased. This is understandable since each agency has its own set of needs, etc. but some type of information repository which federal buyers could use for market research and negotiation/disussion purposes would be a very powerful tool. Years ago, when I was a Contracting Officer for a federal agency, we had a card file (OK, I'm dating myself) which every buyer could access to see what other buyers paid for the same supply and/or service. We then could use this information for IGCE purposes, negotiation leverage with contractors, pricing justifications, etc. Technology today can support an electronic version of this type of repository. FPDS-NG is not granular enough, nor is FedSpending.gov. This type of info has to be catagorized at a fairly low commodity level (maybe UNSPSC?) to be of any worth.