Page 49 - Federal Computer Week, January/February 2019

spoke about them frequently. Over time, however, I became a bit skepti- cal of both stories. I wondered how many businesses would start selling to the government if the socioeconomic requirements were eliminated. And I asked to what extent the onerous dis- closure/audit requirements were actu- ally imposed on contractors that were selling commercial items to the govern- ment, particularly if there was compe- tition for the purchases. The law said the requirements didn’t apply in that situation, but industry said the govern- ment frequently imposed them anyway.
I came to suspect that industry oppo- sition related to the requirements being imposed on traditional defense com- panies for military equipment or sub- systems bought through sole-source contracts.
Companies weigh in on barriers
I recently had an opportunity to gather empirical data to address my questions with the help of the Digital Services Coalition, a group of small, nontradi- tional IT vendors entering the federal marketplace. Founder Robert Rasmus- sen, CEO of Agile Six Applications, and Dan Levenson, a longtime Department of Health and Human Services contract- ing officer who is now chief strategy officer at Agile Six, sent a survey to the coalition’s founding members. The survey listed five commonly cited bar- riers and asked three questions: What was the most important barrier on that list, what was the least important, and what could government do to reduce the problems associated with respon- dents’ most important barrier?
The survey’s list of potential barriers: • Socioeconomic requirements.
• Government invoicing, recordkeep- ing and accounting/cost disclosure requirements.
• Government IT services as a low- price, low-profit, low value-added mar- ket that is not attractive to tech talent. • The structure of the work (e.g., pre- scriptive requirements/minimal access
to users) not aligning with commercial best practices.
• Having to make business decisions to partner with “traditional Beltway ven- dors” that don’t align with your values.
Fourteen companies responded. The two most important barriers — cited by five and four respondents, respective- ly — were prescriptive requirements/ minimal access to users and proposal writing, which is considerably more complicated and jargon-filled than in the commercial world. Next, with three responses each, were government con- tracting’s low-price environment and
The government can choose to think more creatively about requirements and about the burdens of proposal writing.
having to contract with traditional Beltway vendors.
Socioeconomic requirements came in last with one vote, followed by disclo- sure/auditing with zero. I am guessing the firms have not yet been asked to provide cost data and that socioeco- nomic requirements are more of an irritant than a deal-breaker.
What about the least important bar- riers? Three respondents put a low- price environment at the bottom of their lists, two each cited cost disclo- sures and socioeconomic requirements, and one pointed to proposal writing. Nobody thought prescriptive require- ments and the pressure to work with traditional Beltway vendors was the least important barrier.
Opportunities for improvement
Respondents had a number of sugges- tions for mitigating the problems. The most common was breaking work into smaller chunks.
One said: “Modern vendors can build systems in incrementally useful ways
for relatively small contracts (10s of millions vs. 100s of millions) with clear performance checkpoints.”
The next most common recommen- dation was to promote the U.S. Digi- tal Service and the General Services Administration’s 18F. In addition, one interesting suggestion that at least merits consideration (though it would require a statutory change) was to “cre- ate a program similar to 8(a) that allows regular small businesses to be directly contracted with for smaller, specialized procurements (perhaps sub-$2 million in value as an example, and limit the number they can participate in).” One respondent suggested the oldie but goodie of better debriefs.
Those results are fascinating and suggest we should think differently about barriers to entry in the federal marketplace. A good piece of news is that the two most important barriers in the view of respondents are ones over which the contracting system has the most control. The government can choose to think more creatively about requirements and about the burdens of proposal writing, and there are indeed some moves in the right direction in the form of technology demos and procure- ment contests.
By contrast, the two barriers emphasized in the dominant narra- tive — cost disclosures/audits and socioeconomic requirements — have been imposed on the system from the outside via laws and regulations over which contracting officers have little control. But if those barriers are less important to today’s new entrants, then agencies can make real prog- ress without waiting for Congress or a governmentwide policy. n
Steve Kelman is a professor of pub- lic management at Harvard Uni- versity’s Kennedy School of Govern- ment and former administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. His blog can be found at fcw. com/thelectern.
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