After reading the Acquisition Advisory Panel's 448-page draft report, it's obvious that this is the playbook for the next era of federal procurement policy and legislation.
Internet Protocol version 6 will be worth the pain. Change without warrant is for naught. But in technology, change is not only better, it's inevitable.
No growing business would try to operate without documented business processes, illustrated by flowcharts, but when it comes to the many business processes where taxpayer money is spent, such process documents are hard to come by.
People in government and industry continue to confuse "assisted acquisition" with "direct acquisition" when talking about how purchase requests for items available under pre-negotiated contracts become purchase orders.
When people talk about the wide-ranging troubles at the General Services Administration today, I'm reminded of a similarly challenging situation in the mid-1990s that turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to the agency.
We in the federal technology market, in working out our next move, occasionally make time to lift our heads from the task at hand, look around and evaluate just what's hot, what's not, who's up, who's down, where to invest, what to avoid and who's likely to do what next.
Policymakers in the acquisition community are using the term "big A" acquisition when discussing the need to improve everything from capability analysis to outcome measures, as opposed to contracting ? the "little a" of acquisition.
If your company's technology can make a difference in the effectiveness of a program or a major system, your government customer needs to know about it long before you hope to make a sale.
So many partners, so little time. Manufacturers are constantly developing new technologies to improve the operations of large corporations. After proving private sector success in markets such as finance or logistics, they cast their eyes toward the public sector.
An opportunity for yet another cottage industry has emerged in the federal ecosystem. It's called blowing the whistle on competitors with noncompliant contracts, and it pays well.
The most recent example was this summer. GSA insisted, under threat of termination, on major price reductions for Sun Microsystems Inc. products across multiple schedule contracts. But other audits are quietly working through the discovery and settlement process, which involves an analysis of every order and price a company charged for goods and services to federal and nonfederal customers.
Lately, I've been thinking about what role small businesses can play in the growing initiative to implement strategic sourcing across federal agencies. Are there specific activities they can facilitate between the federal agencies and technology manufacturers?
I was briefing a management team on the Office of Management and Budget's strategic sourcing memo that asks agencies to define three commodity areas ripe for this methodology. I explained how enterprise license agreements with software publishers can be structured to lower administration costs, but still allow many resellers, integrators and small businesses to participate in the business.
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