competition | The Contracting Education Academy

November 6, 2019 By cs

How a new acquisition approach is changing — and challenging — HHS

The Department of Health and Human Services has adjusted its approach to technology acquisition in order to keep pace in innovation.

In a moment when agencies across the government are grappling with how to adjust their acquisition framework to ensure they have the most advanced technology, HHS CIO Jose Arrieta said his agency has decided to approach acquisition by laying out its objectives first.

“We establish the way we want to interact and work with the contractor,” Arrieta said Oct. 30 at the Data Coalition’s GovDATAx conference.

Another key to the HHS approach has been taking “price off the table” and setting maximum awards ceilings for contractors. Then, the contractors can compete for the work.

HHS has been a leader in federal government in deployment of emerging technologies.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.federaltimes.com/it-networks/cloud/2019/10/30/how-a-new-acquisition-approach-is-changing-and-challenging-hhs

October 24, 2019 By cs

Just 1 bidder is vying for 2 Pentagon programs worth $130 billion

The defense acquisition chief is looking into the Army’s disqualification of a second bidder to replace Bradley armored vehicles.

It’s a pretty widely accepted business principle that competition is good for business. But for two separate programs potentially worth a combined $130 billion, the Pentagon has just one possible bidder.

That’s prompted the U.S. Defense Department’s top weapons buyer to look into the U.S. Army’s $45 billion effort to replace the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Service officials recently disqualified one potential competitor, leaving just one company to bid.

“I’m just getting more involved in that one right now,” Ellen Lord, defense undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, said at a Friday press briefing.

DoD leaders have spent the past few years delegating the oversight of most major acquisition projects to the individual military services, a move intended to remove bureaucratic hurdles, speed up development and get weapons to troops faster. This marks the first time that Lord, who has held her job since August 2017, has publicly said she would step in to review one of those programs.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.defenseone.com/business/2019/10/just-one-bidder-vying-two-pentagon-programs-worth-130-billion/160718/

December 27, 2018 By AMK

Three competing options for acquiring innovation

The DoD’s technological edge is eroding.

Since 2015, the department has pursued a strategy to regain the lead. During the Obama administration, it was called the Third Offset. The Trump administration has abandoned that nomenclature, but it is pursuing the same objective.

The DoD seeks dominance in robotics, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and three-dimensional printing, among other fields. It recognizes, however, that such innovation will not come from the usual sources — government labs or the defense industrial base.

Nondefense firms have a decisive lead: The center of gravity in cutting edge, military applicable research is shifting abruptly away from the defense establishment to relatively new commercial firms. The DoD must engage with these nondefense firms to build the next generation of weapon systems. But how should it do so?

Two decades ago, defense economists David Parker and Keith Hartley, mapped the options for procurement along a continuum. On the far left, managerial diktat determines sourcing, and prices have little role in the process. On the far right is a fully competitive market, where the “relationship between buyer and supplier is transitory, non-committal beyond the current purchase, and arm’s length”; between these extremes are, from left to right, subsidiary purchases, joint ventures, partnerships, networks, preferred suppliers, and adversarial competition.

Keiran Walsh, Yale professor of economics, distilled these options down to three:

[T]here are three basic ways of getting people to do what one wants done. One can force them to
behave as one wishes them to. One can give them a set of incentives that aligns their interests with
one’s own. Finally, one can try to shape the values that they hold so that they will naturally want to
do what you wish them to do.

Walsh’s three alternatives, Parker and Hartley explain, correspond to coercion, competition, and long-term partnering. Of course, the same option needn’t be chosen for every procurement, and perhaps different alternatives may work better in some cases than in others. But the DoD must choose from these options as it determines how to buy innovation from nondefense commercial suppliers and perhaps should identify a default that works best in most cases.

Keep reading this paper at: https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/ASPJ/journals/Volume-32_Issue-4/V-Schoeni.pdf

November 19, 2018 By AMK

How contracting officers want to use the new micropurchase threshold

Steve Kelman’s recent talk with feds reinforced his view that a $10,000 micropurchase limit opens up vast new acquisition possibilities.

Recently I did a webinar at the request of the General Services Administration’s Acquisition Gateway for professional services, as part of their Spotlight training series, on the new micropurchase threshold. As I have blogged before, the threshold has been raised to $10,000 for civilian agencies and, through a strange anomaly that hopefully will be corrected soon, to $6,000 for the Department of Defense.

This change will allow agencies to make procurements of up to $10,000 without (if they choose) competitively soliciting or evaluating proposals, though some of the agencies that have started using the authority have chosen to develop one-page requirements statements and solicit one-page competitive proposal. Regulations implementing this change are unfortunately not out yet, but a number of agencies — including the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security and GSA itself — have received class deviations to introduce the change now. However, the GSA class deviation applies only to GSA’s own purchases, not more broadly for any purchases using GSA vehicles.

Keep reading this article at: https://fcw.com/blogs/lectern/2018/11/kelman-micropurchase-ideas.aspx

October 24, 2018 By AMK

FBI drops full and open competition for $5 billion IT recompete

The competitive pool for the FBI’s $5 billion IT commodity and services contract has been shrinking throughout the year and recently got even smaller.

Rather than hold a full and open competition for spots on the Information Technology Supplies and Support Services contract, also known as ITSSS or IT Triple-S, the bureau announced that spots will be awarded to vendors that already hold contracts on the General Services Administration’s IT Schedule 70.

Bureau contracting officials have been scaling back the contract as they’ve gathered market research through requests for information and industry days. After initial rumors the contract would be split into multiple parts for services like cloud computing and cybersecurity, the bureau announced in April that ITSSS would remain a single contract made up of multiple tracks.

The track structure remains in the latest revision, however, the blanket purchase agreement will now only include vendors with pre-vetted tools and services being offered on Schedule 70, further narrowing the competitive pool.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2018/10/fbi-drops-full-and-open-competition-5-billion-it-recompete/152031/

The Department of Health and Human Services has adjusted its approach to technology acquisition in order to keep pace in innovation.

The defense acquisition chief is looking into the Army’s disqualification of a second bidder to replace Bradley armored vehicles.

The DoD’s technological edge is eroding.

Steve Kelman’s recent talk with feds reinforced his view that a $10,000 micropurchase limit opens up vast new acquisition possibilities.

The competitive pool for the FBI’s $5 billion IT commodity and services contract has been shrinking throughout the year and recently got even smaller.

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