OMB has issued the latest of a series of directives aimed at simplifying and reducing duplication in the acquisition process, Anne Rung, administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, said in a blog posting that “the overwhelming feedback from industry and other stakeholders is that the sheer complexity of the federal contracting space is leading to less innovation, higher costs, and weaker performance. We have more than 3,300 contracting units across the federal government, but there’s very little sharing of information and best practices and very little collaboration across our organizations. “The result is that we have a lot of duplicative efforts. For example, in FY 2013 we had more than 23,000 awards for HR training and services alone. Further, we have no central unit to share pricing information. When we’ve looked at pricing, we see huge price differences for the same exact item – sometimes as much as a 300 percent price difference.” Elements of the policy memo include: Buying through category management, which shifts from managing purchases and price individually across thousands of procurement units to managing entire categories of purchases across the government collaboratively. Developing a plan for increasing digital acquisition capability, including a pilot program to train agency personnel in digital IT acquisitions and deploy trained personnel back to their agencies to encourage innovative acquisition practices. Reducing the burden in commercial item acquisitions, especially for small businesses, through steps such as having one entity manage the relationship with a company government-wide.
The memo is here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/procurement/memo/simplifying-federal-procurement-to-improve-performance-drive-innovation-increase-savings.pdf
