Digital Government
Clean up GSA service schedule procedures
I yield to nobody in my admiration for the changes in the General Services Administration's information technology contracting operations since 1993. The agency has transformed itself from dinosaur to space warrior. Under the leadership of Roger Johnson and David Barram and in a world where defense
Digital Government
Removing the oversight roadblock
In the research I've been doing over the past year on organizational change in the procurement system, one question I asked government contracting officials was: What were the most unpopular rules or regulations among contracting professionals in the years before procurement reform?
Digital Government
Performance-based contracting out of reach
Performancebased contracting for information technology in the federal government contracting for results to which a vendor commits when it signs a contract has a long way to go. Although the government is making progress in asking for specific performanceoriented results, the typical requGMT
Digital Government
Reward industry for RFP suggestions
I recently attended the second meeting of a group working on introducing better incentives into contracting. Ken Oscar, the Army's senior procurement official, convened the meeting. For an account of the first meeting, see my column in the Aug. 2 issue of FCW. Toward the beginning of the meeting, t
Digital Government
Try procurement reform, you'll like it
One of the amazing perks of being an academic is the long summer vacation, starting in early June and ending after Labor Day. The day after graduation, faculty jackets and ties come off, and polo shirts and jeans even shorts appear. A professor who so chooses can proceed to spend three months l
Digital Government
Language shows world-view shift in federal IT
Remember ADP? What veteran of the federal computing scene doesn't? For the benefit of newbies, in federal parlance, ADP was not the name of the company founded by nowSen. Frank Lautenberg (DN.J.) that does payroll processing for businesses. Rather, it stood for 'automatic data processing,' and it
Digital Government
Army smart to push for contract results
The most important trend in contracting today is a growing recognition that the crucial benefit of procurement reform is giving the government more leeway to structure business arrangements with vendors in a way that increases the chances that contractors will deliver results to government customer
Digital Government
Auctions the next tool for the federal buyer
An amazing thing happened to me recently. In the span of one week, I received three phone calls from organizations looking to introduce online auctions into federal government buying. Industry hates auctions for one good reason and one bad one. The good reason is that auctions evoke the old, discre
Digital Government
Public good not always second to politics
Especially outside the Washington, D.C., Beltway, most Americans believe that the idealistic rhetoric appearing in the statements and speeches of senior government officials, filled with concern for the public good, is for public consumption only. Peel the onion, most people assume, and you will re
Digital Government
Commerce makes commitment to small biz
Before procurement reform, using 8(a)s was almost the only game in town for government agencies to use to award contracts quickly and with a minimum of red tape. This encouraged too many 8(a)s to develop the unfortunate 'business model' of seeking work on the back of an inefficient procurement syst
Digital Government
Moving the feds from difficult buyer to smart buyer
Traditionally, the federal government has been a difficult buyer. By a difficult buyer I mean one that imposes lots of extra costs and risks of doing business on vendors. Extra costs have included those arising from unique contract clauses, such as Buy American, or governmentunique specifications,
Digital Government
Use rewards to extend vendors' pacts
Bob Woods, the longtime government information technology manager now working in industry, was talking with me recently about the need to have provisions written into government IT contracts that give better incentives for vendors to deliver results. 'I have a great idea,' he told me. 'It's like ai
Digital Government
You can learn to be a smart decision-maker
When I was in government, one of the most common questions folks in Washington, D.C., and those back home in Cambridge, Mass., asked me was, "What's the biggest difference between being in government and being in academia?
Digital Government
Small biz must build better mousetraps
In danger of becoming conventional wisdom is the idea that procurement reform has made it more difficult for small businesses in the federal marketplace. Much of the wisdom is based on the problems traditional smallbusiness government contractors have had in the new environment. I was therefore in
Digital Government
Procurement reform moving into next phase
Because they often cost so much money to attend, one hesitates to use the expression 'a dime a dozen' to describe them, but certainly one may say that conferences are a staple of Washington life. Rarely, however, does one describe them as 'breathtaking' or 'historic.' Yet I recently attended an ev
Digital Government
Fight the urge to sole source task orders
The growth of multipleaward taskorder contracting for services opened up by the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act (FASA) in 1994 and by the growth of the General Services Administration services schedule is an important advance for government information technology customers. Indeed, doubt
Digital Government
Correct use of past performance key
I recently received a phone call from a friend who works for a vendor that had just lost a big award. Company executives learned during the debriefing with the agency that a major reason why the company had not won was that it did not score as well as others on past performance. My friend was somew
Digital Government
Air Force's PC buying strategy on target
The blanket purchase agreements for PC hardware, software and peripherals that the Air Force's Standard Systems Group (SSG) recently negotiated as successors to the Desktop V contract will provide Air Force customers access to uptodate, quickly refreshable information technology. The amazingly co
Digital Government
More feds giving due diligence its due
Over the past year or two, a new phrase has entered the federal information technology acquisition vocabulary: due diligence. When the concept was just beginning to enter the federal lexicon, I wrote a column about the idea [FCW, June 22, 1998]. The phrase is adapted from the commercial mergersand
Digital Government
Reform empowers Air Force, Navy
One of the most basic underlying themes of the reinventing government movement has been greater empowerment of the federal workers to use their heads to come up with ideas for how to make government work better and cost less. A highly educated, generally publicspirited federal work force had for t
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