By Catherine Geanuracos, Rebecca Woodbury
Overview
Finding technology for service delivery and operational goals can be daunting. It’s hard to navigate the government technology marketplace and easy to be swayed by persuasive sales people and slick marketing. Simplifying the “ask” and staying focused on problems and users (not requirements) makes buying tech manageable.
Problem
Most government procurement practices are outdated, restrictive, and ill-suited to buying modern products and solutions. Overly-specific Requests for Proposals (RFPs) with cumbersome response requirements produce low response rates. Complex RFPs make it harder to evaluate what’s really important from vendors.
This stifles competition and innovative government technology solutions, which leads to lackluster public services, frustrated staff and residents, and wasted time and money.
Solution
Procurement practices and policies should allow governments to effectively buy solutions and replace outdated ones when it’s no longer serving the needs of staff and the public. Vendors should be able to easily respond to government needs, expanding competition and choice.
Governments can implement better practices to facilitate streamlined, less stressful tech purchasing. Demanding choice and better outcomes pushes vendors to innovate, continuously improve, and provide great customer service.
Context
Do your own research
Get a sense of what’s out there: search the internet, review case studies, and ask other agencies what they use and if they like it.
Raise your contracting limits
Increase limits and only do a full RFP process when it’s really warranted. Your research might find something for less than the amount that requires formal procurement.
Maximize vendor participation
Make it easy to respond to your solicitation, if one is required. Drop overly prescriptive requirements (such as having implemented the exact type of project with your exact type of government).
It might be tempting to base your requirements on the capabilities of a specific vendor, but this leads to bias and limits your vendor pool.
Governments are often swayed by vendors offering a suite of products because:
- Dealing with one vendor seems easier than managing multiple contracts
- Internal users want one login
These don’t typically end up being true or leading to better public service. And you might miss out on a vendor who does something you need really well.
If you must list all the things you need in one RFP, allow vendors to only respond to parts.
Describe the problem, not the solution
Instead of overprescribing the solution with pages of requirements, focus on detailing the problem you are trying to solve or the service you want to provide. Provide context, desired outcomes, strengths, known pain points, and the root cause of the problem.
If you don’t have this information you might need to do research to better understand your and your community’s needs. Develop and share guiding principles and organizational priorities with vendors and use them in your evaluation process.
Don’t assume the way your service worked in the past is how things should work in the future.
Be firm on non-negotiables
Accessibility
Government services need to work for everyone, by law. This includes digital information and services provided by third-party vendors.
Interoperability
Look for vendors that work well with others through APIs, open source, and integrations, when it makes sense.
Security
Demand strong security practices, including multifactor authentication, regular updates, and secure hosting.
Privacy and data ownership
You are a steward of important data! Make sure you can access and export the data your systems collect. Read and understand vendors’ privacy policies.
Evaluate the right aspects
Local governments struggle to make good buying decisions. This can result in overpaying for subpar services.
Key factors to evaluate:
- How well it helps you achieve your goals
- How it improves productivity and reduces friction
- Ease of setup and IT burden (use vendor-hosted SaaS whenever possible)
- Cost (setup, annual maintenance or subscription)
- Track record (avoid vendors who failed similar projects or had lawsuits)
- Data access and security
- Can you try it? (not just a demo)
Focus your evaluation criteria on the non-negotiables and user experience.
Use each procurement to move towards a modern, modular service “stack” for your government, where pieces can be changed out when a better solution becomes available.
Mantras
- Buy better
- Simplify to expand your options
Checklist
- Describe the problem you are trying to solve and challenges you face.
- Get rid of outdated requirements that don’t help you find the best vendor.
- Increase your purchasing authority so you can use informal bidding for smaller scale projects.
- Involve people who use the software day-to-day (staff and residents) with evaluating the vendors.
- Try before you buy.
Questions to ask
- Does bundling under a single vendor improve services or is it just easier to purchase?
- What underlying values drive decisions in our organization?
- How committed are our vendors to the non-negotiables?
- Does the vendor have a track record of easily integrating with other third-party systems?
- Have we spoken to other governments who’ve used the product? Do they like it?
- Is this a technology problem or do we need better policy and business processes?
Learn more
- Public Technology Procurement Guide, Public Code Foundation48
- Govtech Industry Standards: Developing values-based procurement criteria for technology sourcing, Catherine Geanuracos49
- Procure Access, DisabilityIN50
- Local government website buying guide, ProudCity51
- Modular Procurement for State and Local Government, 18F52
