Editorial: An acquisition game-changer

Last spring, the General Services Administration announced plans to pursue a more streamlined approach to federal procurement.

Called Category Management, the concept involves breaking procurements into broad categories — such as IT, professional services, office management and the like — and then managing those spending categories across all agencies to be more coordinated and efficient.

Today, just the opposite of that exists: There was $428 billion in federal procurement spending last year conducted by more than 60,000 procurement staff dispersed across 500 procurement offices. Untold billions of dollars of staff time, procurement funds, industry bid and proposal work, plus other expenses, are dedicated every year to an endless cycle of uncoordinated procurements that are often duplicative and needlessly expensive.

As our cover story explains, by tracking and analyzing data on specific categories of procurement spending across government, managers can see where duplication is occurring, where wide pricing variability is occurring, where opportunities for consolidation exist, and then make adjustments.

The result should be fewer contracts, more coordinated procurements, better prices, better buying behaviors and lower procurement spending, especially in two of the largest spending categories: professional services and information technology.

This effort could truly be a game-changer in the arena of federal procurement. One potential rub will be the degree to which agencies provide the needed spending and pricing transparency.

Fortunately, the move has gotten a big vote of support from new Federal Procurement Policy Administrator Anne Rung and, more recently, from President Obama last month.

GSA is reorganizing now to align around the new category-focused model. There's much work to be done, but Category Management, if done right, should be a major step forward in making a nearly half-trillion-dollar procurement operation far more efficient and better managed.

Steve Watkins

Editor