Acquisition evolves with GSA's BetterBuy Program

About six months ago the General Services Administration, in collaboration with the American Council for Technology-Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) and the National Academy of Public Administration, launched the BetterBuy Project to make acquisition more transparent, participatory and collaborative.

"At the end of the day, we're trying to reach the best industry solutions for what we're trying to buy. But in getting to that point, we wanted ideas from the public, which meant beyond the typical or traditional federal sector," said Mary Davie, the Assistant Commissioner of GSA's Federal Acquisition Service office of assisted acquisition services, in a recent interview with FierceGovernmentIT.

Typically, the information-gathering stage of acquisition is brief and straight forward, said Chris Hamm, the operations director at the FAS federal systems integration and management center. A civil servant asks for input from two or three federally-employed experts and then has two or three companies submit a corporate capabilities briefing on the project or service. With the BetterBuy Project, interested parties are collaborating simultaneously as they share information--leveraging Web 2.0 technologies.

Wikis allow all interested parties to see the status of projects and comment on them-- often triggering a debate on what features should and should not be included in the solution. The discussion also informs contractors on whether or not to bid a project.

"It probably slows down the procurement a little bit up front, but it greatly improves the quality of the output," said Hamm.

The information gleaned from the RFIs for Data.gov and Clearpath are two concrete takeaways from the project thus far (read more about these RFIs in the full interview). But BetterBuy isn't just about GSA or procurement. The collaborative approach introduced by the pilot may be the biggest lesson for other agencies. 

Hamm said once people started using the collaborative tools, they realized new ways to apply Web 2.0 to their own agencies, such as creating standard operating procedures based on Wikis. "It's almost just a new way of thinking about how we do our business," added Davie.

For more:
- see the full Q&A with Mary Davie and Chris Hamm

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