Michael Asner Consulting
michael@rfpmentor.com
This article is from Issue #49 of The RFP Report. The entire report can be found at:
http://www.rfpmentor.com/rfp-report.html
Getting What You Need on the Way to the Win-Win! Leveraging the RFP in State Technology Procurements (May 2005)
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Acknowledgement
This report, co-produced by NASCIO and NASPO is copyright NASCIO 2005. Excerpts are included with their permission.
NASCIO is the National Association of State Chief Information Officers and represents the state chief information officers from the 50 states, six U.S. territories and the District of Columbia. Other IT officials participate as associate members and private sector representatives may become corporate members. For more information, please see www.nascio.org.
NASPO is the National Association of State Procurement Officials and represents the directors of the central purchasing offices in each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the territories of the United States. For more information, please see www.naspo.org.
For a copy of the entire report, go to: www.naspo.org
For more information about this report, contact:
Mary Gay Whitmer
Issues Coordinator, NASCIO
(859) 514-9209
mwhitmer@amrinc.net
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Earlier this month, NASCIO/NASPO released this important report. It’s only 18 pages but it goes a long way to promote best practices by dealing with several key issues – critical success factors.
In many public bodies, state and local governments and their agencies, there is tension between Information Technology and Procurement. This tension has been there for years. It is based on organizational issues, structure, and attitudes. Let me explain.
IT and Procurement have different core mandates. IT’s job is to acquire and install technology to permit the organization to achieve it’s operational goals. Procurement’s job is to ensure that goods and services are acquired in an efficient manner consistent with public policy and the courts (“Fair and open competition”). So, their jobs are very different. This leads to conflict.
Typically, the Information Technology people “know what they want” and simply want to order it. They often view Procurement as a barrier to acquiring new technology in a timely manner. Many I.T. people do not want to acknowledge the impact of public policy on the procurement process. They think they are in the private sector and that procurement laws and directives don’t necessarily apply to them.
In these organizations, Procurement often becomes the custodian of public policy. It is Procurement that must ensure that the competition is “fair and open”. It is Procurement that owns the process and it is Procurement that will be subjected to scrutiny and challenged in court.
To make the situation more difficult, IT usually reports higher in the organization than Procurement – it has more power and influence. It can argue, at the highest level, that there is no time for “fair and open competition”. It can undermine the evaluation process.
So, in many organizations it is critical to encourage development of a partnership between IT and Procurement so that both can “win”.
In some public bodies, especially at the state level, IT and Procurement work well together and produce some impressive results. WSCA (the Western States Contracting Alliance) is an excellent example of using RFPs (including Best and Final Offers) to procure IT products and services. Part of their success was in finding a person to run the procurements who understood both public procurement and IT. Terry Davenport, formerly with the State of New Mexico, ran the IT procurements for many years. Terry has a background in both IT and Procurement – so one of the most critical issues influencing success, IT’s understanding of Procurement, disappeared.
This report prepared by two major organizations representing IT and Procurement has two important messages:
- Success requires that the two key stakeholders, IT and Procurement, work together in acquiring technology and integration services; and
- The RFP process incorporates public policy and leads to “best value” procurements.
This report highlights several critical success factors – best practices which, if ignored, put the entire project at risk and when followed, lead to success.
The report itself is organized into five sections and several appendices:
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• Section I: Background.
• Section II: Planning the RFP.
• Section III: Writing the RFP.
• Section IV: After the Release of the RFP.
• Section V: What State CIOs and Procurement Officials Need to Know.
• Appendix A: A Note on Other NASCIO and NASPO Resources.
• Appendix B: Additional Resources.
• Appendix C: Do I Have an Alternative? A Word about Alternative Procurement Models.
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The report has a short section offering much encouragement for cooperation to promote success.
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Section V--Conclusion: What State CIOs and Procurement Officials Need to Know
- States should use the flexibility of the RFP process at higher levels to ensure that a procured technology is providing the government purchaser with the maximum level of benefits, including the degree to which the solution improves a state’s business processes.
- In a time of rapid state CIO turnover, new state CIOs should place on their task list time to learn about the state’s IT procurement process, if he or she is not familiar with it. Once the state CIO becomes familiar with the process, he or she will be better able to leverage existing state IT solutions and move the entire state IT enterprise closer to a standard for specific types of IT systems and processes.
- States should consider including at the beginning the following officials in the RFP process: the state CIO, the lead state procurement official, state procurement attorneys (which, depending on a state’s structure, may include the Attorney General’s office), budget and fiscal officials, agency program officials, including those versed in the agency’s business processes, and the end users of the technology.
- State CIOs and procurement officials should communicate with each other prior to and during a procurement.
- A state must determine early in the RFP planning process its business needs and ultimate outcome desired.
- States may consider leveraging the expertise of the private sector community through an RFI if the state is lacking in expertise on the type of technology needed.
- The state should consider at the beginning of the procurement whether and how it will provide a process for offerors to ask for clarifications regarding an RFP.
- A state and offeror need to reach a “meeting of the minds” in order to ensure that they understand one another and have a common vision of the IT procurement’s ultimate outcome.
- A successful balance of performance versus technical specifications will focus on telling the offeror what the desired outcome of the procurement is and how the IT solution must perform once implemented in order to satisfy the state’s expectations.
- To ensure that offerors know that the exceptions process is fair and encourage them to provide quality proposals, a state should tell offerors in the RFP what the rules for exceptions are and stick to applying those rules fairly across the field of offerors.
- Whether the state has means of ensuring the protection of confidential, proprietary or legally protected information or IP or makes it of public record as a matter of legal mandate or policy, states should make clear to the offerors via the RFP how such issues will be handled.
- Consult your state’s legal counsel to draw the parameters of what actions are legally permissible within in your state with respect to IT procurements.
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