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.
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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.
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