“The way government buys technology uses horse-and-buggy era budgeting and Cold War era processes,” a government industry leader said in a recent interview.
- This column the second in a series about three myths that hamper government’s ability to modernize its acquisition process. See Myth #1 at: http://contractingacademy.gatech.edu/?p=5850.
This isn’t far from the truth. The federal procurement system was built to fit the Industrial Age. In fact, our entire national system is anchored in an Industrial Age manufacturing model. Of course, this worked well at the time, but the world has moved on and it is now obstructing national innovation, competition and progress.
We’ve entered a new era—the Collaboration Age—and it is profoundly different.
We see the global impacts and feel the changes in our everyday lives. We live in a world of mobility, integration, connectedness, data analysis, shared information and distributed power. And yet, federal agencies are riddled with stovepipes, hierarchy and linear, slow, information-poor processes. Acquisition is encumbered by excessive oversight, starved for data and, understandably, locked into an assembly-line mentality.
Keep reading this article at: http://www.govexec.com/contracting/2014/06/3-myths-cripple-acquisition-no-2-reforming-acquisition-will-fix-it/85534/
