Why agile procurement is anything but boring: the govtech perspective

Traditionally, before any technology can be purchased to modernize government, a budget must be allocated; research must be done both to gather requirements and understand the market and field of potential vendors.  This research is then codified in a solicitation that describes the specific requirements that must be met by a group of vendors wishing to supply technology to the government.  Often the vendors are pre-qualified based on the criteria set in the solicitation.

Solicitations can take many forms and run from the simple RFIs (request for information) to the complex RFPs (request for proposals).  Complex solicitations can run into 100s of pages with 10-20 exhibits and attachments, many of which are boilerplate to ensure the solicitation complies with rigorous purchasing regulations.

“When procurement goes well, almost no one notices. The urgency that sparked the technology acquisition is long gone.  So one objective I had is to speed up the process, so that technology is acquired closer to when the need first surfaced, not 24 months after the fact.  So … while procurement wasn’t part of my job description … it was something I had to care about.  Modernizing procurement … became a bit of a rallying cry for me personally. I’ve seen too many technologies acquisitions go awry because they took so long that the requirements specified were obsolete the date the RFP was solicited.” – former Deputy CIO for a major state

While no one tracks this statistic exactly, we know from talking to CIOs, Agency Leaders, and Procurement Officers inside government that complex solicitations can take 12-18 months to prepare and involve a team of 10-15 contributors.  Sadly – once these solicitations are proffered – they are often immediately out of date.  Vendors don’t always know how to answer them because the requirements detailed were prepared with a knowledge of what was possible with yesterday’s technology, not today’s.

“I just got a notice that [PRODUCT NAME] was approved for purchasing on a blanket purchasing authority issued by the State. This would be a good thing except that [PRODUCT NAME] was discontinued 14 months ago.  There are several new products that meet or exceed the requirements and at least one of them is available at a lower price. But the State cannot buy it because only the older product is price listed.”  – former Purchasing Manager, major technology company

Fixing this isn’t easy.  And it is important.  To the extent we can streamline traditional procurement, the benefits both to government and the people it serves could be huge.  Access to more modern technologies.  At a reduced price.  Greater innovation.  Faster digital transformation.

Authorium is committed to modernizing the technology acquisition process used inside government, to drive more innovation and digital transformation. Working with one large client, we developed Solicitation Builder, an enterprise-class application to speed up workflows that:

• supports remote work and collaboration across a remote team of contributors
• uses AI and machine-learning to harvest language from “historical” solicitations for reuse so that the people who build solicitations can stop recreating the wheel each time the do
• makes burn down charts readily available so that everyone involved in a solicitation can better measure progress and accelerate the pace as needed to hit deadlines

We’ve seen clients use Solicitation Builder to cut the time required to author a complex RFP from 18 months to 90 days.  Our goal with Solicitation Builder is to allow government to move at the pace of technology when it comes to technology acquisition.