The General Services Administration has been limping along with a series of databases the government uses to find, register and analyze federal contractors. These databases, currently managed by five different agencies and eight different contractors, have long suffered from inaccuracies, duplications and poor system capabilities. But they are about to get an overhaul.

The GSA plans to award a fixed-price contract by the end of October to re-architect this hodgepodge of information that has long failed to follow the money in the federal government. Other contracts will be awarded subsequently to improve and consolidate the underlying systems. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra says it will take two to three years before the system is completely overhauled.

This is a major project for the federal government that spends more than $500 billion alone on contracted products and services. Watchdog groups have criticized these databases for their inaccuracies, being difficult to use and not being accessible. In some cases, important data fields were left blank. In others, only one-third of the contracts had documented performance assessments.

The question here is, what good is a database if it is not an accurate one?

For more on fixing procurement databases:
- check out this InformationWeek article

Related Articles:
The downside of transparency
The government's top 50 IT contractors