As part of an effort to reform the federal acquisition process for technology, US Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, unveiled an ambitious 25-point plan for addressing many of the issues that plague the way the government purchases technology in hopes of delivering more value to the taxpayer. Part of the implementation plan was to counter the misunderstandings about how industry and government can engage with one another during the acquisition process, specifically by government. Because of the artificial barriers between government agencies and their industry partners, rampant waste and program delays have become the norm that erode the value of these IT investments.

To combat the status quo, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has launched a "myth-busters" campaign to educate government, and eliminate public sector barriers to communication and enhance awareness of the most efficient and effective technologies available in the private sector. Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFFP) Administrator, Dan Gordon, outlined in his Feb. 2nd memo the planned outcome of this campaign, which is to remove communication barriers and improve the overall acquisition process that includes specific initiatives on needs identification, requirements definition, acquisition strategy formulation, market research, the proposal process, and contract execution.

I have been writing about the need for improved communication as a central theme of acquisition reform for some time (here, here, and here), so I am glad this formalized implementation plan has taken shape. What I am also glad to see is that the communication plan is not only a public sector initiative, but is also being done with industry.

Leading this effort is the industry group the American Council for Technology (ACT) - Industry Advisory Council (IAC), which has launched an online forum called BetterGovernmentIT.org, to collect feedback that will later be reviewed by OMB, the Chief Information Officers Council and the Chief Acquisition Officers Council, according to ACT-IAC. This site, which is styled after the General Services Administration's BetterBuyProject, uses crowd-sourcing techniques for contracting professionals to identify common myths about vendor engagement and information that will help improve public/private communication. One important option included is to engage anonymously, which will hopefully encourage dialogue without the fear of retribution by government officials or providing other firms competitive information.

These encouraging efforts can only help improve what is a truly becoming a broken system where communication barriers are getting more and more entrenched. What can truly improve the overall process is having open communications with industry as early in the process as possible. These early communications, in the need identification stage, can greatly improve the requirements development process, which I believe to be a truly broken process. These early exchanges can vastly improve the chances of good acquisition outcomes, which includes reduced costs, improved performance, innovative solutions, increased competition, and with proper oversight, improved overall government management.

These public/private efforts have the ability to produce desired effect, but only if these efforts are coordinated. OMB, OFPP, and ACT-IAC need to ensure data and feedback from their respective efforts are all shared amongst each other, which includes sharing lessons learned, and transfer knowledge. It would be a shame if effort to improve communication were conducted in the same, stove-piped echo chamber they are being conducted now. As these initiatives move forward, the increased communications can only help shape the future of acquisitions to the benefit of the taxpayer.

As Government continues to leverage its buying power through continued fiscal pressures, one process that is not getting enough attention is the use of reverse auctions. Reverse auctions are an effective and efficient means of realizing large savings on purchases of not only commodities, but highly defined services as well. Although current initiatives exist such as the General Service Administration's (GSA) Federal Strategic Sourcing Initiative (FSSI), which encourages adoption of industry best practices, federal buyers are simply not going far enough in leveraging their buying power to maximize price savings. To achieve maximum efficiency, the Government should begin to create holistic strategic souring initiatives that include reverse auctions as a mechanism for cost savings, since programs such as FSSI are simply catalog buys to bidders that have been pre-qualified, and mimic the GSA Schedules program. Further, many Program Managers and other acquisition officials I have spoken to state that they do not always get the best prices by using these types of pre-negotiated arrangements, and thus buy either directly from vendors or execute procurements outside these initiatives. The result is ineffective buying and the continuation of not maximizing efficiencies to the detriment of the taxpayer.

Reverse auctions are by definition a structured competitive bidding event where competition can be maximized to help drive the price lower over the course of the event. One common reason I have heard for the poor adoption rate is technology barriers, which is a frankly a disingenuous reason. The benefits of potentially significant cost savings, enhanced transparency, increased collaboration, increased competition all outweigh any barriers that seem to be artificially created by Federal organizations. If the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Obama Administration are serious about Open Government and accountability, then enhanced adoption of reverse auction should be further explored.

Another stumbling block to adoption is the issue of transparency, as the risk adverse nature of Government creates issues that should not exist through fear of protest that seems to be paralyzing acquisition decision-making. The reverse auction process is Acquisition 2.0 in motion, as reverse auctions create a structured and automated negotiation process with transparency at its core, since the process depends on vendors creating a clear and documented process for creating the pricing structure and the subsequent contracted price. It is the openness of the process that should be embraced, since the reverse auction allows for real time pricing feedback, and also allows acquisition officials to have real time visibility into the negotiation. This type of structure and the transparent process creates and enhances competition, reduces complexity, enhances collaboration, and ensures compliance with the acquisition policies and regulations.

It is these types of procurement methods that should be embraced, and will need to be further explored to help create holistic strategic sourcing initiatives for realizing true cost-savings by adjusting processes, ensuring leadership drives change, and breaking the endemic status-quo culture of Government. Successful examples of reverse auctions already exist through both Defense and civilian agency use, so lessons learned are available for use and need to be expanded upon to help with widespread adoption. As OMB continues to issue guidance on improving federal acquisitions and government management in general, reverse auctions need to be part of this process of continuous improvement and increasing accountability to the taxpayer.

Over on Federal Computer Week, Dr. Steve Kelman has written several blog posts on The Lectern in a series of issues related to improving federal acquisitions and communications, specifically information technology projects. Although I have commented on the specific blog posts, I wanted to have a more in depth discussion here.

Improving Federal IT Acquisitions

I felt the wrong questions were being asked.

...Early in the conversation, Dan Gordon, on the panel as the administrator of the federal Office of Federal Procurement Policy, posed an important question in a very interesting way. He asked: "I am guessing that many in industry know when they read an RFP [request for proposals] that the government is putting out to bid a program that is likely to fail. Yet I am also guessing that industry seldom says this to the government. What can we do to change this?"...

Many issues are raised with this line of questioning. First, what benefit would industry have at this stage in the acquisition to be offering advice on an RFP? None really. In fact, I believe that this type of information would put industry at a disadvantage, since the government would never pull an RFP or even consider reshaping requirements since an enormous amount of effort and time have been dedicated at this point. For large IT acquisitions, it sometimes takes years before and RFP gets issued. Although sometimes requirements are so poorly written that cancelling an RFP and starting over really is the best solution, this seldom happens. Programs fail before they even start, and taxpayers get fleeced. This story is all too common in federal procurement.

The real issue here is to get the requirements properly structured so that the program can be successful from the beginning. Using the current Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), all the tools already exist in Market Research (FAR Part 10), and Exchanges with Industry Before Receipt of Proposals (FAR 15.201). So why are these techniques seldom used? What can be done to improve this process?

Contracting personnel, in addition to project and program managers, need to understand that the current process is not working. The fear of protest, possibly unethical behavior, or unknowingly giving away proprietary information (i.e. risk aversion) needs to change. If these fears were proven to be the case, the FAR would outright prohibit any exchanges with industry in the first place. Government personnel need to understand that programs fail at the beginning, due to poor acquisition planning and poorly defined requirements. Almost any Government Accountability Office report on acquisition failures will undoubtedly have these statements in the Executive Summary. What was the definition of madness again?

One initiative that needs to be expanded and fully embraced is the General Service Administration's Better Buy Project. This initiative has had successful trial runs using Gov 2.0 techniques (e.g. blogs, Wikis, etc.) to solicit input and feedback on both the federal acquisition process, but also on specific procurements using crowdsourcing methodologies to help improve the communications process between GSA and industry. There is no more equal playing field than using these techniques, since everyone has the opportunity provide input and helping ensure a procurement is successful from the beginning.

The biggest barriers are of course cultural. What is very telling are some of the comments from both sides of the issue on Dr. Kelman's post, illustrating the great divide and skepticism that exists from increased access and communications.

Government's Side:

...One major issue is: companies do not necessarily want to hand over their expert critiques to the government for free. Companies often find their top ideas used to fix a bad requirement--that is free consulting. They are giving away their ability to differentiate themselves from other firms that don't see the flaws and/or don't know how to solve them. Secondly, if companies were truly partners with the government, this would not be a problem. However, neither government nor contractors really want to be partners, in fact. If they were, they would accept the consequences together of bad outcomes, and the companies would make no money. No one has ever seen a government contract that reads remotely like a partnership agreement. Partnering is hackneyed, misleading, self-serving, and false in just about all its usages in the government contracting arena...

Given a chance, I believe that industry would gladly help the government resolve issues up front in the requirements development process, again if given the chance. I do not believe it is practical, nor realistic, to think that industry will voluntarily tell the government an RFP is a disaster. Several reasons include the fact that these comments will fall on deaf ears, or worse, adversely affect a company's image. Further, the notion of best value seems to be elusive, as lowest costs seems to be the primary source of contract awards. Why bother adding value when lowest cost is desired. Perhaps value engineering should be part of every project, and adding the lessons learned to future engagements.

However, it is the partnership that will ultimately lead to program success. The comments left by this reader are unfortunately not uncommon, and somewhat true. Many firms have a vested interest in the status quo, and do not seem eager to change their approach. I also do not see the practically in using industry feedback as some kind of evaluation factor as Dr. Kelman suggests. This approach would undoubtedly lead to self-serving "improvement requests," which is what best value is supposed to correct for anyway; what is in the best interest of the government (e.g. exceeding requirements and differentiating a proposed solution).

Industry's Side:

...Both responses to your suggestion are accurate. We, as contractors, don't want to be in the position of suggesting to an agency that their pursuit position is incorrect. We never know who accesses those types of comments nor how they may react to suggestions to improve their position. The second suggestion is more prevalent than many expect. "Cut and paste" RFIs and Sources Sought requests generally include inadequacies, inconsistencies and contradictory pictures of the agency's true environment. These are indications that they technical involvement necessary is absent or lacking and making suggestions as to how to correct these are often not received well. In addition, fear of OCI issues has reached a point where these same contracts people will not even talk with or accept input from industry well in advance of the solicitation release. Until contracting people understand that the government encourages interaction with industry up to the release of a solicitation, these issues will not go away...

I do not believe that technical incompetence is the primary issue. I believe, and have experienced, that technical competence for a program is a function of acquiring that knowledge that normally exists internally. The fragmented way that the government buys is normally the culprit, where programs develop requirements in a vacuum without conducting a thorough stakeholder analysis, soliciting feedback or input for proper requirements development, then kick it over the fence to acquisition and contract shops. At this stage, not knowing the procurement or even the customer in some cases, contracting shops try to getting the procurement of their desk and take shortcuts at the detriment of the program, as the reader suggests. Using boilerplate information, templates, and checklists are a great way to streamline an acquisition. There is certainly nothing wrong with this approach, as I certainly use these tools with federal clients. However, tailoring the information carefully is vital, and sometimes this quality control is lacking in federal procurements.

The Organization Conflict of Interest (OCI) issue is another barrier to increased communications from industry. Many firms fear that being proactive in helping shape requirements will OCI-themselves out of competition for a particular procurement. This is a major issue that needs more thoughtful analysis, as the point of crowdsourcing is to solicit information from all parties equally, and allow for even greater opportunities for competition with requirements that are not overly restrictive and well understood by industry. Firms should not be penalized, nor should they have fear of being penalized. The government is doing itself a disservice by not properly proving these protections.

Overall, the closed-door mentality to communications is doing the opposite of what the latest acquisition reforms are trying to accomplish. I hope the Office of Management and Budget provides further guidance on this issue, and give industry a greater say in helping the government execute its acquisition reforms. All parties would benefit, especially the taxpayer in the end.

With the end of the fiscal year comes the right of passage for government contracting personnel and contractors alike; the end-of year budget dump or as I like to call it, the end of fiscal year feeding frenzy. This time of year is characterized by the worst practices in federal contracting: lack of any real acquisition planning, abundance of improperly justified sole-source contracts, and the overall lack of meaningful competition.

Coming off the heels of a new report by GAO on the lack of competition, one clear issue is the woefully inadequate communication between industry and government.

The SBA takes the general position that a procuring agency does not need to document in a contract file any other prospective sources if the agency selects an 8(a) participant to perform the requirement, offers it to SBA, and SBA accepts the requirement into the 8(a) program. SBA officials note that it is the procuring agency's responsibility to conduct market research to determine whether the requirements of the Small Business Act can be met, and then to determine the appropriate contracting vehicle to use. However, SBA considers market research requirements to be satisfied when a participant in the 8(a) program self-markets its abilities to a procuring agency and is subsequently offered a sole source 8(a) requirement. When we discussed this issue with procurement policy officials at DHS, they said that, while these activities may meet the regulatory requirements, in practice they like to see additional market research so that the offer to the 8(a) firm has a more solid basis. {Emphasis added}

Get it off one's desk seems to be the prevailing attitude, along with the closing down of accepting any new requirements to handle the end-of-year rush to get dollars out the door. Is it just simple correlation that more procurement activity carries more risk of protest? If so, then something has gone wrong.

To improve competition and get meaningful best value outcomes, communication with potential vendors is an essential part of the market research process. Common forms include written exchanges of information (e.g., submission of marketing materials or responses to Requests for Information), in addition to also meetings with potential vendors.

However, it is the risk aversion and untrained contracting officials, combined with poor integration with program management and contracting that often makes this process difficult. A recent article in Government Procurement magazine shared a similar sentiment:

This concern can have a chilling effect on communication with vendors. In response to a request for a meeting prior to release of an RFP, one state official recently wrote: "If I meet with them even as an introductory meeting, then I assume they understand they will be precluded from bidding on any project we bid out the next six months." Is this level of concern by state and local officials warranted? We think clearly it is not.

Nor do I. In fact, Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) Part 15, "Contracting by Negotiation," balances the dual goals of "openness" and "integrity" in the procurement process by specifically encouraging pre-RFP meetings and exchanges of information between public officials and potential vendors. Good acquisition planning needs open communications, not to mention the FAR specifically identifies "one-on-one meetings" as an appropriate means of accomplishing these exchanges. Program Managers needs to ensure they know what is appropriate, and Contracting Officers need to provide this guidance and act as business advisors in this process. Simple processes to help alleviate end-of-year fiascos before they happen.

What really are the goals here? Openness, transparency, and fairness for starters. Procurement official must treat all potential vendors impartially and provide equal access to all. This ensures the process is fair. For these reasons, I believe initiatives like the Better Buy Project are an important tool to meet these procurement goals, since crowd sourcing is the foundation for access to all, along with Acquisition 2.0 tools that continue to provide the transparency and openness required of the contracting process.

An informed understanding of current industry capabilities and practices results in both better RFPs and better contracts, since industry will have participated in requirements development to ensure fairness, but also realistic objectives and schedules to also help ensure positive outcomes.

More communication with industry promotes more competition, better solutions and better pricing. Ambiguity in the final RFP translates to misaligned solutions or risk for a vendor who responds with higher pricing. The latest developments, especially in such complex fields as information technology, healthcare and environmental sciences, are difficult to harness unless you put industry competitors to work for you.

Let's capture innovation and stop reinventing the wheel, as I too believe it is ridiculous to think that government officials are so easily manipulated or influenced with these approaches that communications and Acquisition 2.0 initiatives will rig procurements. It is risk aversion and the lack of accountability indicative in the procurement process that acts as barriers to success. Continued advancements through Acquisition 2.0 pilots will hopefully not only demonstrate the potential of openness and transparency, but also provide guidance on transforming the way government does business and allow for accountability to the taxpayer, which should be the ultimate goal.

Preamble: I'm Kevin Merritt, CEO of Socrata, a leading provider of open data services, based in Seattle, WA. While Socrata is focused squarely on helping government organizations share their data in human-comprehensible and machine-readable ways, I don't personally have a long tenure of experience selling software or services to the government. In full, transparent candor, the procurement process is the most challenging part of working with the government. It's complicated. So much so that many companies selling to the government have GSA contracting specialists to help navigate the process. As a taxpayer and businessperson, I'm in favor of making it simpler and more effective for innovative companies to do business with the government.

In March the General Services Administration (GSA) conducted a pilot project designed to make procurement a more transparent process. In the pilot, GSA submitted to industry an RFI for the next phase of evolution of data.gov. I participated in the pilot and want to share my feedback as a means to hopefully improve the overall procurement process.

Historically, GSA would issue a Request for Information (RFI) and industry would submit their responses in private. There is no back-and-forth communication between GSA and industry while the RFI response window is open. Without regard to GSA specifically, an RFI is often used to conduct basic market research and to help refine the requirements that will ultimately be included in a formal solicitation - the Request for Proposal (RFP).

The BetterBuy pilot project was novel in that it asked industry and interested individuals to submit their responses to the RFI, through a publicly editable wiki. It was the most transparent and collaborative RFI conducted by the federal government to date.

For those unfamiliar with wikis, they are web-accessible, collaborative content management systems. They allow anyone to create new content pages and even to edit the content created by others. Wikis work well for a few reasons:

• General trust between and among the participants.
• A community moderation system that identifies and corrects erroneous content.
• A robust audit trail that shows who created (or changed) what.
• Tools allowing site administrators to manage content revisions and versions.

In general, the BetterBuy wiki pilot was a success. Quite a few people participated and the discourse was civil. I believe the GSA data.gov team received valuable feedback, which will shape and influence the detailed requirements of the RFP. As importantly, I believe industry received some valuable feedback from the GSA data.gov team.

GSA would not have conducted the pilot unless there exists a serious intent to improve the procurement process. I believe their intention is sincere and genuine. To that end, I have some constructive feedback and suggestions for improving the process in the future.

1. Don't map the structure of the RFI to the structure of the anticipated RFP. By doing so, the participant pool is somewhat restricted to those comfortable and/or familiar working within a prescribed format. What might be better is for the soliciting organization to loosely enumerate their questions and requested feedback, and broadly categorize those by subject area - background, physical architecture, logical architecture, security, functionality, accessibility, pricing, terms and conditions, etc.
2. One of the potential benefits in a more open process is a level playing field. As such, provide an RFI platform that offers more transparency about the participants themselves. For example:
1. Participants should use their full names and identify their affiliations;
2. GSA administrators should be easy to identify;
3. Industry submissions, including the possibility for multiple submitters per company, should be easy to identify;
4. I suggest having three contributor profiles with corresponding, visually distinct badges - administrators, industry and interested citizens.
3. The wiki site itself was a little sluggish throughout the response period, but especially in the last few hours leading up to the close of the response window. Make sure there are adequate resources so the site operates smoothly In future acquisition collaboration programs.
4. The GSA itself should be more collaborative during the RFI response window. For example, if industry responds to an initial question in a way that doesn't provide the answer/clarification it's seeking, why not annotate the response with a follow-up question? It's this kind of back-and-forth dialog that represents a really open and transparent discussion.
5. Consider using IdeaScale or similar crowd sourcing platforms instead of a wiki. Potential benefits include:
1. A more natural environment for questions and answers, especially when it's anticipated that there will be multiple answers per question and/or multiple answerers per question;
2. The ability to more elegantly categorize questions by subject area;
3. Greater ease of use, improving participation;
4. A clearer question and answer threading system allowing participants to both respond to official GSA questions/requests but to also reply, rebut and/or provide feedback on the answers provided by other participants;
5. Visual indicators and/or badges identifying participant roles and their affiliations;
6. The ability for participants to vote up/down good/bad ideas submitted by others;
7. The ability for participants to suggest new questions that weren't initially thought of;
8. The ability for administrators or participants to mark a response as the best answer;
9. More transparency around the number of answers provided, new questions asked, top votes, etc. via statistics and analytics.
6. Without regard for my 5th suggestion, if a wiki is the preferred approach for collecting industry feedback, take advantage of wiki "sections" which can be edited in isolation, more locally, without locking the entire page and without encountering edit collisions.

Unfortunately the current acquisition and procurement processes exclude many innovative companies - lacking the expertise, patience or desire - from providing much needed, best-of-breed technologies and services to the government. However, I believe the GSA is demonstrably serious about improving the acquisition process and the BetterBuy pilot is a big step in the right direction. We all can look forward to a more streamlined procurement process in the future.

Why has it been so difficult to execute performance-based contracting? Certainly the complexities of modern-day service contracting play a part, but as Steve Kelman, former administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy points out, it has been a frustrating and slow moving initiative making little headway in proper execution of these methods.

...There is one obvious reason for this: If you haven't included performance metrics in your contract, it involves a lot of work to change it into a performance-based contract when you go to recompete it. And there are other reasons. Sometimes it is genuinely difficult to develop relevant performance metrics for contractors, just as it is for in-house activities -- for example, what are relevant outcome-based metrics for State Department diplomacy? Finally, there is the sometimes vexing issue of changing and adding to performance metrics during the life of a long contract as technology and user requirements change...

The issue is beyond metrics, as it starts with understanding the outcomes and objectives of what performance-based contracting is all about. It requires a different mind-set, a different set of skills and capabilities, but most important, it involves understanding that culture is probably the biggest barrier of all.

The tools of the Acquisition 2.0 community can have a role in changing this culture, as one of the central tenets of this methodology is about collaboration, specifically between industry and the government. Using initiatives such as the Better Buy Project, outside parties, as well as those inside the government, can add value to the dialogue:

...Program managers need to recognize that some of the things that add to the time it takes to get a contract awarded are good investments that ensure faster and better execution of the contract in the long run. In that case, the evidence is overwhelming that using performance metrics -- whether for in-house or contracted activities -- can improve performance by motivating and focusing employees and facilitating feedback, which is a necessary tool for organizational learning. We need to bring those benefits to contracting...

Of course, determined leaders acting as change agents will always be needed to push for new ways of doing business. Deborah Broderick, the FBI's new senior procurement executive, seems to understand these responsibilities and has taken a lead in changing the culture at FBI and its mixed track records of procurement outcomes.

One of her approaches was to actively engage training where it counts, to help program managers, contracting officers, and the contracting officer's technical representatives in developing proper performance-based contracts with objectives at the time of actually writing the bid. This approach has allowed for innovation, and the ability to focus on outcomes. Further, the approach measures those outcomes through development of proper performance metrics and other contract provisions specific to the procurement in question and not generic metrics made for manufacturing or other boilerplate metrics that are used for the sake of speed and cutting corners. As Dr. Kelman points out, these methods will take time, and leaders must help offset the pressure for speed and sacrificing doing what is right. This pressure is often short-sighted, and may help contribute to the status quo; cost, schedule, and performance issues.

Acquisition 2.0 tools can help aggregate the ideas for performance metrics through crowd sourcing, as both industry and government know what has worked, but more importantly, what has not worked. We have to understand that performance-based contracting is not a silver bullet. However, when investments are made in these techniques, the return on that investment has the potential to be great, and go a long way in improving government management overall.

To date, there have been 100+ ideas submitted for the BetterBuy Project ("the Project") and they keep coming in! Community participants are obviously very interested in the federal acquisition process and how to improve it. A little while ago, GSA's FEDSIM published Data.gov and ClearPath, which are the two Project pilot procurements which will test a few of the ideas/concepts that have been submitted.

As Mary Davie indicated in her March 25, 2010 blog entry titled "Transparency, Collaboration and Participation in the Federal Acquisition Process is Here," the American Council for Technology/Industry Advisory Council's Acquisition Management Shared Interest Group (SIG) is taking the next step to review the remainder of the ideas that have been submitted, categorize them and select a an additional number to be discussed further and possibly placed into action.

The Acquisition Management SIG has initiated the review process and is working towards the end goal of categorizing the remaining suggestions/ideas. We are discussing each suggestion in light of the ultimate objective of the Project, which is "how can we use collaboration and social media to make the federal acquisition process more efficient and effective?" Once complete, our plan is to involve the GovLoop Acquisition 2.0 community to further flesh out the suggestions through additional crowdsourcing, etc.

Please stay tuned for further progress reports and remain engaged in the conversation!

Hello all-

Sincere thanks to GSA for the opportunity to make our first post in this space.

Upon seeing the BetterBuy initiative mature and bloom into two very real pilot opportunities, we were faced with a challenge:

How can we craft effective RFI/RFQ/RFP Responses that balance transparency with our obligations to privacy?

In order to avoid shareholder lawsuits, public companies are required to guard corporate assets which can include a company's trade secret assets and other proprietary information such as, clients (i.e., past performance), project methodologies that create competitive advantage, detailed pricing data and more. Each of these items is probably key to include in a winning RFQ/RFP response and/or a persuasive RFI response.

In an age where technology can facilitate a full RFI/RFQ/RFP response in an online Wiki, how can we maintain an environment that allows public companies to respond to BetterBuy's Wiki-style Requests without this legal risk? We wanted to bid, but we wondered whether a public company might face that built-in obstacle that private organizations might not. Did other organizations have similar challenges?

Thanks again for the opportunity, and we look forward to sharing additional observations and lessons learned soon.

GSA FEDSIM has two BetterBuy pilots underway: Data.gov and ClearPath. The experience so far has been interesting. On my end, there was a tremendous amount of uncertainty leading up to the launch. Will the wiki work? Will people know how to use it? Can the server handle all the traffic? Will one or two voices dominate the discussion?

Several months worth of effort went into the launch. When we finally went live, I was anxious to see the response. And at first, nothing happened. . . . .

A few individuals created user names, but didn't change anything.

A few more folks provided free 'editing' services, correcting typos, spelling out acronyms, and correcting verb tense.

Finally, after about a week, we started to see meaningful discussions and contributions on the wiki. I was curious about why it took so long, so I asked a few users about their process. It turns out that industry had the same questions that I had. No one was sure who was 'authorized' to speak for their company. Normal procedures for providing a response to the Government for these companies are established, and this wiki threw a wrench in the works. It took a few days for them to develop a plan on how to response. One company even wanted to know when we were going to lock down the changes so that they could post their info at the last minute.

From my perspective, the Data.gov use of the wiki was a resounding success. We received a substantial amount of feedback, and our resulting solicitation will be significantly improved as a result. It will, however, take us longer to review the feedback and judge what should go into the final version. Now I'd like to see more attention on the ClearPath wiki. . . .

Lastly, I'll end my post with some wiki statistics:

Pages
(All pages in the wiki, including talk pages, redirects, etc.) -49
Page edits since BetterBuy was set up -373
Average edits per page -7.61
Registered users 152
Active users who have performed an action in the last 7 days -33
Views total 68,718 (misleading number - includes our testing)
Views per edit 184.23

Page Views
Main Page -46,304
MediaWiki:Sidebar -3,406
Background and Questions -3,143
Section B - 1,717
Section C - 1,694
RFI - 1,468
Section D - 1,097
Section F - 849
Section H - 714
FAQs 588

The General Services Administration buys a lot of stuff (products and services) for the country, and they're figuring out how to help us all get what we pay for.

Overall, the GSA's trying to figure out how to break from traditional bureaucracy, learning from private industry and the public, asking people what they think via a site BetterBuy.

One really good idea from BetterBuy is being tried now.

The GSA wants to break away from the traditional system where the companies that provide the stuff help specify what the stuff should be. Normally, they put out Requests for Information and Requests for Proposals, and companies help the GSA figure out what to specify.

That means the companies that want the business gets to define what the business is, and can tailor that to their strengths and weaknesses. Any change to this could threaten the less effective, less competitive businesses.

The deal is to open up this process to everyone, including the public and the companies who want business from the Feds, so that we can work together for the country. One way to do that is on the Net using a Wiki, and that's what they've created, the BetterBuy Pilot(s) Wiki.

GSA is seeking input on a requirement to provide a data repository for data.gov. The data.gov pilot was ready to launch on March 25, 2010. The second is called "Clearpath". For this one, GSA is looking for input on the technical infrastructure for our Clearpath hosting, and developing the approach for a future acquisition. GSA will launch Clearpath in a few weeks.

You are invited to contribute in multiple ways:

(1) Help us write the draft solicitation

(2) Ask questions below each section

(3) Engage in meaningful technical debate below each section

(4) Point out mistakes

(5) Ask general questions

(6) Contribute! This is the most transparent acquisition that GSA FEDSIM has ever attempted.

For better explanations check out Federal Computer Week GSA tries wiki approach to develop RFPs or GSA solicits wisdom of the crowd for acquisition improvements