Why Agencies Need Acquisition-as-a-Service

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Christopher O’Connell.

By September 2015, no new purchasing contracts are to go through the federal government’s Standard Procurement System (SPS). The entire legacy procurement system is slated for sunset by 2017. With the sunset of SPS, there’s an opportunity to do procurement better in the federal government. Let’s call this notion "acquisition-as-a-service."

Some agencies already seem headed in that direction. But before we turn our attention to them, here’s a hard truth: Federal procurement processes have been poorly served by technology. Acquisition is a costly and complicated business, with little uniformity among the applications that automate acquisition’s repetitive functions…

Legacy systems that handle procurement processes often are not capable of fully supporting the work. To show just how far Federal procurement technology is falling short, in August 2012, Appian conducted a survey of federal acquisition professionals. Here are the results:…

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