The future of government technology procurement

The General Services Administration and 18F recently held an open request for quotation related to a new blanket purchase agreement for a federal marketplace for agile delivery services. The transparency throughout the entire process was refreshing and provides a window into the future of procurement as well as what FedBizOpps could and should be.

The RFQ asked companies to provide a working prototype with code submitted in a public GitHub repository that could be viewed, watched, forked or downloaded at any time. Timestamps built into GitHub’s commit timeline publicly exposed when a company began working and when and whether it “submitted” its final version within the allocated timeframe.

The objective of the BPA, according to 18F, was “to shift the software procurement paradigm” from a waterfall-based development model with a long, tedious approach to acquisition that typically favors large, established inside-Beltway vendors to one that encourages small business participation, and that required all companies to work in the open, using GitHub to expose not just the code, but how the teams worked together and documented their efforts.

CivicActions (full disclosure: I work for them) participated in the process, and I played a role in developing parts of the front-end and productizing the end result, which was SideEffect.io, an adverse affect comparison tool that leveraged open data from the Food and Drug Administration’s OpenFDA initiative (GitHub repo here).

Having played a minor role on the team and having an odd appreciation for how government IT leaders are working to modernize technology procurement, the process was fascinating to watch both from how GSA and 18F pushed this out and managed, but also an inside perspective on how one company responded and worked together (FCW’s Zach Noble has a great write-up on how the CivicActions team worked, the tools used and its general philosophy going into it).

My general takeaway is that this is the future of the request for information/quote/proposal process. In the future, much like what I prototyped at OpenFBO, for each procurement request, there will be repo-like tools that fully expose public input and questions, allow internal and external stakeholders to easily “watch” for updates, attach bids or quotes with an opportunity for feedback, all of which would eventually turn into the repo for developing the end product.

As GSA and 18F, and hopefully other federal, state and local agencies, continue to refine this process, whether it’s via GitHub or a Git-like platform, you can be sure this is the future of how government will procure custom-built software and services.