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In my earlier post, I commented on the "risk averse" nature of government acquisition. In our efforts to be fair to all, the manuals that we use grow longer and longer (e.g., the Federal Acquisition Regulations, supplemental Agency Regulations, Acquisition Policies, GAO decisions). This is an environment that has not embraced change and new technology, and for good reason.
When I asked around my office for volunteers to work on the pilot, not a lot of hands went up. A few brave souls eventually snuck over to my office to learn more, and finally we formed a team. We have a Contracting Officer, a Contract Specialist, a Project Manager, a few Technical Advisors, and an Acquisition Project Manager who will have to pull all of this together. Hopefully, I'll get to help steer all of this along without disrupting the rest of the organization's daily operations.
We spent the last two months evaluating the recommendations on BetterBuy, identifying the ideas that were feasible to implement, and working with our information technology support personnel to set up the infrastructure properly. We met with OMB, GAO, and other parts of GSA to discuss best practices for open collaboration, making decisions about things like user registration and authentication, roles and responsibilities for team members (e.g., who controls our twitter account, who can post). We are nearly ready with our wiki site for requirements definition. This process shines a bright light on established procedures and forces everyone to consider the value of the activity. Fun times!
My office (GSA FEDSIM) primarily works with other Federal Agencies on their procurements, but we also support a few internal GSA customers as well. We have been talking to these internal customers as the most likely candidates for the pilot project(s). We have two in our sights. Both are working with new technology and align well with the increased transparency through BetterBuy. We plan on launching the pilot in February, so stay tuned. . . . .
Chris Hamm is the Operations Director at the U.S. General Services Administration's Federal Systems Integration and Management Center (FEDSIM), which provides project, acquisition, and financial management services to the Federal Government
