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.
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:
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.
We are looking for ideas to make federal acquisition more open, transparent, and collaborative. What does that mean?
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.
This online forum allows you the opportunity to post comments and other information that will remain publicly viewable on this website. The site therefore operates a moderation policy to ensure that comments are appropriate and not harmful to others. Comments which include any of the following may be deleted by site administrators:
Additionally, while we invite open participation and diverse viewpoints to be shared, moderators reserve the right to remove posts which do not address some aspect of the stated purpose of this forum: To collect ideas about using collaboration and social media to improve the acquisition process. We deeply value your time and input, and our desire is to remove as few posts as possible while ensuring that a focused, constructive discussion takes place.
Finally, in addition to this policy, this site allows individual users to flag ideas as being spam, duplicate, or otherwise inappropriate. When an idea is flagged a sufficient number of times, it is automatically placed into a queue for review by moderators. We reserve the right to remove any posting that receives a sufficient number of "flags" to be placed in this queue, though will not automatically do so.
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Too often vendors have to travel to these meetings. Give them a chance to have "face time" in a Web-based way. Saves us all time and money. And you can record it for those who couldn't be there at the time.
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John Woodall
I am in Industry and have attended several Industry Days via the internet with streaming video. When the technology works, it is great. When the technology is overwhelmed by multiple users there can be lag and loss of audio/video. Also, the industry days are not always as productive as they could be, because potential vendors are hesitant to ask questions that may reveal their position. I support the increased used of virtual attendance, and would like to see the online events recorded for future reference as well.
Sterling Whitehead
This is the kind of idea the Better Buy Project lives for -- low-cost, high-impact, and easy to implement.
Chris Hamm
I have been responsible for many "Industry Days", and I often marvel at total cost. When you calculate the cost of the travel, preparation, and time of each attendee, the math starts to become very scary. We could just as easily use the same powerpoint slides, add in a webcam, and produce a better product that is available to a larger audience at a lower cost.
We also might get a few meaningful questions at the end. . . .
Hal Good, CPPO
In addition to the good ideas stated here by others, this would take off the table the resistance local agencies have outside the Washington DC area to participate in GSA contracts. The perception is that there is huge advantage to being located near DC, and vendors not having an office in the DC area are at a competitive disadvantage when participation in pre-bid conferences is necessary. Using this medium, would broaden competition and would result in broader participation by state and local agencies in federal contracts.
Green Proposals
Vendors see a real value in a pre-bid conference but it becomes harder and harder each day to "make the trip" for a non-marketing face-to-face and justify the expense. If one vendor has a question chances are they all have the same or similar question. Let's look for ways to eliminate the duplicate phone calls and e-mails. Using a portal to filter the questions to be addressed during the pre-bid makes a lot of sense. Making the entire process electronic is not only more efficient and effective but it allows far more vendors from all parts of the country to have the chance to participate at an equal. There are professional service providers equally qualified to offer their capabilities but are prevented from participating because of the expense associated with attending in person. And then there is the impact on our environment that should not be ignored. Travel has a significant affect but also the submission of proposals requiring reams of paper - a method that could easily be replaced with a safe and impartial third party service provider to handle the entire process. If desired, the electronic sign in sheet can be distributed to participants to encourage prime and subcontractor communication along with an electronic copy of the pre-bid conference.
Peter G. Tuttle, CPCM
With today's availability of inexpensive communications enhancement tools such as Go-To-Meeting or other such conveyances, this idea can be executed in the near term by federal buying teams. Using this medium may actually improve the value of pre-solicitation meetings if vendors could ask questions anonymously. In face-to-face meetings few meaningful exchnages occur since vendors do not wish to tip their hand as to strategy, weaknesses, etc.