Q&A: Mary Davie and Chris Hamm of GSA on the BetterBuy Project

The General Services Administration launched a first for federal procurement effort when it stood up last year the BetterBuy Project, a collaborative effort done with the American Council for Technology-Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) and the National Academy of Public Administration.

FierceGovernmentIT recently spoke with Mary Davie, the Assistant Commissioner of GSA's Federal Acquisition Service  office of assisted acquisition services, and Chris Hamm, the operations director at the FAS federal systems integration and management center.

FGIT: I understand the Better Buy Project is an effort to improve the acquisition process; it's something of an experiment in transparency as well. So, what are metrics do you have in place to gauge whether this initiative is a success or a failure?

DAVIE: Just a clarification, when you're referring to the BetterBuy Project, there are many facets to this whole thing, starting back with when we posted the original platform to get people to provide us with input on how to make the federal acquisition process more collaborative, open and transparent. And then we've moved actually into the acquisition phase. So are you talking about one particular part of the project or the entire thing?

FGIT: I was looking at the entire thing.

DAVIE: Okay. It started about six months ago and it really was, as we said on our platform, trying to look at ways to bring in collaborative technology into the acquisition process to make it more open and transparent and participatory. And to just get better ideas and information from the public on how we might do that and then how we could apply those ideas to a specific acquisition--obviously with the goal of getting better outcomes for the projects that we're working on in government.

FGIT: And how is this going to actually affect the people on the ground level?

HAMM: First of all, it's change. The process for doing any kind of procurement within the federal government is very risk averse. There are established rules, procedures--the way you interact with parties when you're actually making a purchasing decision is very formal. So the introduction of some new, collaborative technology like a Wiki or using Twitter or conducting things over the web, all of that is a change to the normal process.

So it is definitely something that, as an individual person who's operating in that environment, is a daunting task. They're not exactly sure how to do it, but it basically introduces a lot more, I guess the word is "sunshine", into the process. You see more of what the government is working on and how we're making those decisions and let industry influence those decisions a little bit more upfront.

FGIT: Mary, you previously touched on the three phases of the BetterBuy Project. Can you elaborate on those phases, further?

DAVIE: We looked at the pre-award process, because that's really where we form what it is we're going to buy. So, the government, whether it's a new project or something that's been going on for a while, we're always interested in "Is there a better way to buy what we're buying?" Whether it's a service or a product, is there new technology that's out there? Are there new benchmarks or metrics we should be looking at? How would we apply it to our environment? What kind of changes would it require in business process or how would it impact other parts of what's going on in the organization?

So, looking at the pre-award process where we're really working very closely with industry to understand how to buy, what's the best way to buy, how are things being offered today--and do that market research and then define the requirements. Because if you can do that really well, then there's a good chance that once the project gets going and things become developed or implemented your going to, again, have a better chance for success or better results.

So, we felt it was really important to focus on [what happens] before we enter into a contract, to get as much information from as many sources as possible. It can help us make that right decision on how to proceed with the buy. It's all about market research and what we're calling pre-solicitation. And then there's actually going through the solicitation until the point of contract award.

FGIT: So, are there any plans to delve into what's going on next, after contract award?

DAVIE: We haven't really, at least I haven't, thought about the post-award part of the project, but Chris, you're welcome to talk about that part of the project from an operational perspective.

HAMM: We definitely focused more on the acquisition phase, where you're selecting what you want to buy and how you're interacting with companies. So that's where the three phases for acquisition came from. From a post-award standpoint, I'm seeing more use of collaborative technology already, without us having to drive or kick start it.

An example would be NASA. There's a program called "Spacebook;" it's just like Facebook but it's inside of their own network. And [it allows] all of their engineers to collaborate with one another, using that infrastructure already there to share technical knowledge and to find subject matter expertise. So I think in the areas where you already have an operation, where people are trying to support their mission, they're using those tools already.

FGIT: About these Web 2.0 technologies--you mentioned the Wikis earlier--how did you determine which tools to use and which ones were best suited for the initiative?

HAMM: The first thing that we looked at was: What are the best tool out there to use? But then, very quickly, it became: Which is the tool that GSA already owns and already has established terms and conditions?

A lot of things that are free tools that are available on the web, things like Skype. Skype is something that everyone can use in their personal lives but when you go through and read the terms and conditions they're either subject to California law or whichever country created it, their law and the government can't approve the use of those because we can't be subject to California law, we're the federal government. So we then went and looked at our inventory of what software applications and which service providers have we already negotiated terms of service with.

Fortunately, we already had software licenses for MediaKey, which is the underlying software the Wikipedia runs on. And we already had agreements to use Flickr and Facebook and Twitter, and I think there's one more that they just signed. Anything that we already had an investment in and already had approval to use, and then we could go over GSA's social media policy on individuals being able to post that way. Otherwise, like this interview today, it would go through the press and public relations groups and otherwise I wouldn't be talking to the media. This is me talking to every company that's interested. How do I do that? Under what authority in GSA can I sign off on doing things like that?

DAVIE: I think the other important thing there is that, in order to get to the place where we were able to actually select a tool, based on all of the ideas that were received on the original platform, the FEDSIM [Federal Systems Integration and Management Center] team went through them and looked at the ideas and also looked at potential procurements--procurements that they were already working on, or knew they would be working on--and tried to match up those procurements with the ideas. So for instance, if you were further down the road with a project and you had your requirements pretty well defined, we probably wouldn't have backed it up and put an RFI out on a Wiki and asked for input that way. So it really was more, you had to do an initial evaluation also of what kind of technology or tools did we want to apply in our process, based on the specific acquisition.

FGIT: I was actually just attending the Government Web and New Media Conference last week and there was a lot of talk about Section 508 compliance. Did that play into your decision at all?

HAMM: Very much so.

DAVIE: Oh, yeah, a lot of discussion on 508, records management, access to information, you name it.

HAMM: If you think about the original BetterBuy Project website, where people were submitting ideas in those three phases, that's something that was hosted by the national association of public administration. And they did it in a day or so. It was really fast and it went up and they don't go through the same process that a federal government website goes through.

So, it took us a couple of weeks to make sure that all of our things were FISMA compliant, that 508 was absolutely working. ‘Cause the last thing we'd want is for the experiment to fail because we didn't follow normal, government process.

FGIT: You touched a bit on the users of these Web 2.0 technologies. Would you like to add more on who you're trying to reach?

DAVIE: 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. Because there's a lot going on in state and local [government] right now and learning from what they've done, what they are doing and having them contribute as well to what we're trying to accomplish has been really helpful.

HAMM: And one anecdote about that. The second filing project is something called Clearpath. It's largely a mainframe computer that GSA runs, and a bunch of servers for a lot of the applications that run government-wide programs. One of the recurring comments that we're getting on the Wiki page about it is from people outside of the industry saying, "This is really complicated." Which is true. The running of a several billion dollar business to run products to the country and the world is pretty complicated.

DAVIE: Yeah, and we were really interested in that industry perspective. And I think, all along, we've said that we want this to be a very transparent process and we're going to set everybody's expectations in the beginning to say, "We're going to test this and we're going to try doing this a different way and we're going to see what result we get." But we also want to know--not only what were the impacts internally at our agency in terms of process or the legal implications, or the technological implications that we've talked about around the procurement process--what were the impacts to industry? And are they able to respond in this environment? And how effectively are they able to give us better input, or is it faster?

Or maybe a small business now has more visibility into the direction that this is going based on some of the comments that had been received. And it might allow them to a business decision in a more open environment. Because now they've got access to all this information and it's much less closed.

So, really, we wanted to say up front: This is a test. This might not work. If it doesn't that's okay. But we also want to know from the industry, specifically, what were the impacts to you? What were the things you had to think about and go through in order to be able to participate in this and is it going to be something sustainable that we could continue to apply on other acquisitions?

Chris and I both have been working in this environment for so long and some of the biggest things we hear from the industry is that, it's just so complex and we don't know when an acquisition is going to come out. And when it does we don't know what the government is doing with it and how long is it going to take, and when's the next phase going to happen, and of course it's very costly for them.

So, we thought, why not try to open this up to the extent that we can and, again, give people as much information in a different way, but also in conjunction with our traditional process. We're not just scraping traditional processes and saying let's start over and see what happens. But [we are] augmenting them with technology so that people can have almost immediate access to information and be able to participate this way, so that's really what this was. Can we change acquisition? Can we make it better? Can we make it more effective? And can we help the government get better outcomes but [also] get better information into it from the industry?

FGIT: So you want this to be sustainable--a living, breathing project that also translates into a process?

DAVIE: Yes.

FGIT: And as far as the hard data behind the experiment is it going to be compiled somewhere? Is there going to be a single report about why this should be carried on if this is successful? Will there be any information on that, which people can access from other agencies?

DAVIE: We were working with the ACT-IAC Acquisition Management SIG, who was involved with us early on in standing up this platform. And the intent there was to have that group sort of monitor what was going on there along the way and capture lessons learned, best practices, issues, challenges, whatever worked, what didn't work. And I think at some point they're planning to publish a report that would talk about all of that.

HAMM: And for the individual pilot projects, there's definitely a report on, just the web statistics, on who it was reaching, and how many comments and changes occurred. And what we are going to do is to compile that into a lessons learned on other parts of GSA and other agencies if they want to use that same infrastructure, how to use it best.

For example, we go live with these two pilot projects, people see about it and then all of a sudden another part of GSA said, "That's a great part of an application, can I use it?" So we'll be able to just show them the best way to use it.

FGIT: And as far as IAC's monitoring or self-monitoring by the GSA, have there been any takeaways from the project so far or is the assessment stage a little bit further down the road as this progresses?

DAVIE: Oh I think we have a lot of informal takeaways and things that we have learned along the way. Ranging from, what does it take to get something like this going? And then, what would it take to operate in this model going forward? And, would it make sense, in a larger sense, to apply to more procurements or would it be for procurements that need certain criteria or something.

So, I think one of the things again, going back to that we needed to put it out there that this was a test, we weren't quite sure how it was going to go, and I think if you say that up front to set people's expectations, that's one thing that you must do.

And then the other thing is communicating and how to get the word out and how to let people know how they can contribute, what kind of things we would like them to contribute, what we're expecting. And again, this is more broad, at a high level and once we get into, "let's apply these ideas on specific acquisitions," well then you run into current business process or acquisition process, impacts on existing systems, impacts on the process, impacts on people. So you bring your lawyers in and say, "Guess what we want to do?" And then they go, "Okay we need to think about that." And what does that mean for records management or the access to information?

So there were a lot of things that you really need to look through and run down, but then again, kind of quickly to say, yeah we checked these boxes, now we're going to try this and we're going to learn from that and be able to move forward.

FGIT: So it does sound like it has the potential to be repeatable for other agencies from a pilot perspective, as far as procurement. But GSA is kind of the acquisition expert, within government, so do you think that there are some things that can be applied from this project outside of the acquisition realm, as far as crowd sourcing, the use of Wikis, things like that?

DAVIE: Oh yeah, I could see it apply to just about anything. We talked about that too, early on, especially with the BetterBuy platform, just to get ideas submitted that can be applied to anything, we just decided to go ahead with procurement because it's what we happen to focus on and work on.

And as Chris pointed out, with the NASA Spacebook and of course there's Telepedia, and the DoD Techpedia, they're doing a lot in the acquisition world as well, I think that we're seeing a lot of this start to happen, at state and local, a lot of success stories and it's almost just a new way of thinking about how we do our business. And again, thinking about being able to do some managed risk taking and being able to try some things--having to think through it of course because there are impacts everywhere.

HAMM: And it's starting to take things that people are using in their personal lives--status updates on Facebook are effectively like Tweets--and getting people to translate that into what their daily business is. The same thing with the Wiki page: Once we stand something up and people know how to use it, people think, "Hey, this is a great tool, maybe I could use this to write our standard operating procedures for our agency in there and let everybody comment." It's increasing the familiarity that people have with these tools and how they apply.

FGIT: The RFI for data.gov was through the GSA Wiki and it closed on April 7, so I was wondering if you could walk me through what the process is after that stage is done. What was the response and what comes next?

HAMM: The response was overwhelming. It was something that I wasn't entirely sure--because it was an experiment--how much we were going to get. And in the last couple of days we got a real engaging conversation leading up to April 7 that added tons of additional requirements things to consider that the government hadn't considered in our draft solicitation.

So an anecdote for that is how we're going to have the information displayed on mobile devices. We didn't have a section in our original draft solicitation on making sure that it worked on mobile devices and people want to be able to use it on an iPhone. And then there was a debate about, okay well if you're going to have it on and iPhone, you should have it on the Android platform and then on an iPad.

So all of the sudden, we now have a section on how to have the data readily visible on a smaller screen size than what we would have on a computer. So things like that, there are probably five or seven major subject areas that we hadn't considered and we had to add into the solicitation, so they had gone back and made those changes.

And then there was a second area that we hadn't considered on what's the right thing to do--do we want to buy something just for GSA, for our own data repository for data.gov, or do we want to create a government-wide vehicle. So we had to have the meeting at OMB last week and ask them what they want us to do: Should we be building something for just us, or for everybody?

So, making a decision on how big of a contract we're going to create and then have everybody sign off on it. So it took us a couple of weeks to get ourselves organized but I think we're looking at doing the solicitation in the next week or two to actually buy what it is that we're looking to buy.

FGIT: It sounds like this process is making things more efficient--or at least a little more nimble on the front-end.

HAMM It depends on how you use the word efficient. In the past, for doing something like this, I am probably already done with the procurement. 'Cause I only asked for input from the two or three people, who have subject-matter knowledge and are government employees, and I've gotten two or three companies to submit back a corporate capabilities briefing that describes what it is that they know.

But it's now everybody, collaborating all simultaneously. So doing the crowd sourcing thing, it probably slows down the procurement a little bit up front, but it greatly improves the quality of the output. So if we start early enough, if we do enough market research maybe a year before we change what we want to buy, I think it will have a tremendous impact.

FGIT: And, Chris, you touched on Clearpath a little bit earlier and I was curious if you could dive into what the RFI was like and how that relates to the project?

HAMM: Just like I said for data.gov: Relying on certain subject-matter expertise. Clearpath is an infrastructure that is largely aging. A Unisys mainframe and then servers that are related to the mainframe where a lot of applications are run, but in languages that are not typically used for most websites.

It's a huge, behemoth of a system, and the question for us is: It costs a lot of money for us to run it, but it runs perfectly today. We don't have any performance issues. People who are trying to buy products that run through that mainframe, get their products.

But the momentum is not having mainframes and having servers, but doing it in the cloud. Having somebody just provide all of this as a service. I need to understand if the way we do it right now is good enough or is there a reason to move it to a completely different infrastructure?

So in the past I would have just asked that one technical expert, "What do you think?" and then let a couple of companies tell me what they think. And the incumbent will probably say, it's good, you should not change and competitors will probably say, "No, you should change. That's old, we'll build you a new thing." This is a way of letting everybody have that debate out in the public.

DAVIE: And we did have that. It's been really interesting to see what some contributors are suggesting and then immediately you'll get another contributor suggesting something a bit different or completely different. And it's really nice to be able to see their train of thought and how they're arriving at those recommendations.

HAMM: And so far I have not seen compelling evidence that our infrastructure needs to be changed. That's going to be the basis of my market research on how I buy before we go out and do a new procurement.

DAVIE: And everybody else, now, can see exactly what we're seeing. So it's out in the public, people know kind of what the pros and cons are of the way that we're buying it now, so you may then see some people who maybe wouldn't have bid, go ahead and bid. And others who were thinking that they would bid something completely different, now there's not such a compelling case for us to buy it differently not bid. It really helps them make decisions for their bid and proposal dollars and what kind of work that they're going to go after and how they're best suited to support it.