GSA is cooking up a new, comprehensive procurement data source
The more procurement data agencies have, the better they can understand trends and procurement. That's the idea behind GSA's data source effort known as Hi-Def.
The government both creates and runs on data. Given that agencies spend hundreds of billions of dollars on goods and services the more procurement data it has, the better it can understand trends and ‘manage’ procurement. That’s the idea behind a data source effort known as Hi-Def. GSA’s assistant commissioner for the office of strategic innovation, Charlotte Phalen, joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin for more details.
Interview transcript:
Charlotte Phelan: Historically, especially if you go back a multitude of years, the contract data would have been on PDF sheets. It would have been in Google Drive or Google Sheets. And so if I were trying to make a decision based on that data, having visibility into it, access into it, being able to collect it, would have been a very manual and labor-intensive process. Where now when we have it in a database, in an ability to capture and use it, you have a speed to information, a speed to result that did not exist before. And I think for me, that’s the biggest change is instead of having it scattered like pebbles on a beach, we have it all scooped up and in a bucket altogether.
Tom Temin: Right. So a big difference is how soon after the transactions have happened that you do have it and can aggregate it?
Charlotte Phelan: Exactly. And now it’s within moments. So I think the biggest improvement that I’m seeing as the data posture within the FAS, within GSA continues to expand and grow is efficiency. There is an efficiency for the contracting officer and efficiency for the supplier efficiency for the contract agency. They’re no longer having to repeat this search and find and make a decision because it’s literally available to them at their fingertips at a query into a system.
Tom Temin: Right. And so how has that enabled better management of contracting systems?
Charlotte Phelan: Well, I think it gives you much better management because you have access to the collective data, which then is transposed into information. So you’re not just, again, looking at a single task order on someone’s computer. Or if you go back even further on paper like these are now filed like with like, and so you’re able to do an analysis across a multitude of task orders pretty much immediately.
Tom Temin: And to whom do you make the data available?
Charlotte Phelan: Well, it depends on each data set, but it’s the acquisition workforce, it’s industry, it’s other federal agencies that use GSA’s contracts to do their business. OMB can have access to it. I’m working on GSA. My office is working on an initiative with OMB called Hi-Def. You probably saw it in their latest circular that came out. That’s a concept of how collecting and providing access to acquisition data from across the federal government. Our first foray into that, the first tool that sits in the Hi-Def environment is called the procurement copilot. And that is an enormous change in available information where you could come in as a government buyer and you could say, ‘I would like to see someone who has a small business doing janitorial services in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and has an active contract and is a small businesswoman owned.’ And you put that criteria into the tool and you click the button and it suddenly is telling you all the businesses in this area that are doing janitorial services that have the criteria that you asked for. And then it shows you, and this is really the pivot point, what other agencies have paid for that same service? And to me, that’s a game changer. All of that used to be a multi-hour process of an acquisition professional having to go in and find the information in a multitude of different systems or looking through back-in-the-day paper contracts to find it. Now they do a query and it’s available to them within moments.
Tom Temin: And does information thus gathered go into the federal procurement data system? Or is it the reverse true? The FPDS data goes into Hi-Def.
Charlotte Phelan: The FPDS data is a data source for Hi-Def. Yes.
Tom Temin: Right. So you’re really expanding the amount of data?
Charlotte Phelan: Exactly.
Tom Temin: And what are some of the changes do you feel in the management of contracts that are enabled now by having Hi-Def in data that’s pretty soon or too soon to tell?
Charlotte Phelan: Well, it is a little too soon to tell, but I think how a contract is established and awarded will evolve because we have more data available. Bill to say this is what people are buying, this is what suppliers are selling it for. This is fair and equitable. I think when it comes to price delivery, a thriving marketplace, and then certainly compliance will all be informed by how well and how robust our data story is.
Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Charlotte Fallin. She’s the assistant commissioner for the Office of Strategy and Innovation at the General Services Administration. And there’s a number of upcoming vehicles that GSA is still getting RFIs on or RFPs on. And we’re waiting for Comet II and I believe ASCEND and all of these. Can the data from other vehicles help inform the strategy for making sure those are effective and useful to the government when they do get established?
Charlotte Phelan: Yeah, absolutely. And I know that there is a data plan that is established for each of these big vehicles as they’re coming out. And so consistency in that, I think that’s what you’re highlighting. Are we going to see more consistency? Absolutely. Yeah.
Tom Temin: And what about artificial intelligence queries and so forth? That’s got to be a question now if someone queries all of this data as a large language library for a large language model. What sorts of implications there?
Charlotte Phelan: I think that AI has to be governed pretty carefully and I think that AI is the future. We, I think as a society, are headed in that direction. I think the government tends to not be moving at quite the same rapid pace, but it’s definitely a brave new world and I think everyone is excited about how I can help inform how we do business.
Tom Temin: But are people experimenting to your knowledge with, say, taking the Hi-Def data, querying it with open language queries and seeing what it produces?
Charlotte Phelan: I have no idea.
Tom Temin: But sounds like an exciting possibility though.
Charlotte Phelan: Yeah, it does. But I have no firsthand knowledge of that.
Tom Temin: And getting back to the here and now to real life, maybe, the ChatGPT idea for contract data is a new frontier. What kind of efficiencies, what kind of benefits are you seeing right now with the existence of this level of data?
Charlotte Phelan: I think the biggest initiative that we are doing within FAS centered around data has to do with our Transactional Data Reporting (TDR). And we are seeing our errors in how the contracting is done. Is the customer receiving what they ordered? How quickly are they receiving it? We’re seeing our percentages go up in that area like just better success. The efficiency ratings that we monitor are really, really improving because we are using transactional data to inform how we are managing these big multiple-award contracts. So I think that TDR for us is the future of ensuring that we are providing a good price and that the product is actually being delivered in a timely way. And that’s exciting to see.
Tom Temin: So that puts you almost on the same footing technologically as some of the commercial marketplaces that GSA has been adapting.
Charlotte Phelan: Yeah, I’d agree with that.
Tom Temin: Do you also have a system or a way of thinking about the hierarchy of what you might want to go after if something turns up in the data?
Charlotte Phelan: So I think that you’re actually highlighting a really good point, which is what is a product or a service selling for what price was paid? And is there consistency in that prices paid data throughout all of the contracts. It gives us the ability not just to look at Contract A, we can look at contracts A through Z and is there consistency in and I’m going to use your pencil example or the hammer, the ubiquitous hammer example. Someone paid $6 for a hammer and someone paid $600 for a hammer. And it gives us the ability to do some analysis on that result to ensure, again, that the marketplace is fair and equitable. Is $6 a fair and equitable price for a hammer? We cannot assume not.
Tom Temin: A good one.
Charlotte Phelan: Right. But if we assume that 600 is not, but probably the sweet spot is somewhere around $25 or $30. So how many hammers are we selling for? $25 to $30? And how do we ensure that these other suppliers are aware of what a fair and equitable price says so they can change their pricing model and then ultimately have more business?
Tom Temin: Or if there’s an outlier say in the services area, there might be a good reason for it. Well, yeah, those people had to work midnight through 8 a.m. on Sundays for us as opposed to 9 to 5 Monday through Friday, just making that up. But that’s the kind of thing you could flag.
Charlotte Phelan: Absolutely. Yeah.
Tom Temin: So what’s ahead now? What’s your next big step for the Hi-Def data?
Charlotte Phelan: So the next step is we are collecting or being granted access into the procurement data for some of the other federal agencies. And so it’s now a big job to ensure that data is consistent and that if we’re calling something XXL, it says XXO in every single data set. So there’s a big cleanse that goes along with that.
Tom Temin: But it’s an age-old problem, really.
Charlotte Phelan: Absolutely. But our goal is to get to where we can use that data to inform not just the procurements that GSA supports, but the procurements across the federal government. It’s going to be kind of a brave new world.
Tom Temin: And you think the Defense Department will join the fray?
Charlotte Phelan: I actually do. They’ve been very open to it so far.
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Tom Temin
Tom Temin is host of the Federal Drive and has been providing insight on federal technology and management issues for more than 30 years.
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