> And it isn't necessarily a benefit for the Pentagon, as much as it is for the established defense contractors.
As with many government related procurement systems, there is so much paranoia about abuse, and desire not to repeat various disasters from the past, that the system has by perceived necessity become complicated.
Of course it makes it frightfully expensive to the degree that few companies can actually throw the resources at it to be able to navigate it. The lack of competition can result in projects costing a large amount of money, and the buyers in the agencies having no real options to look elsewhere.
At an e-government company I worked for, we a service for the state that helped companies navigate the state's procurement system. We created a centralised place for all data to be gathered by the applicant, generating all the forms they needed, and provided a way for the applicant to track the state of their application. It introduced quite a change for the state, dramatically widening the potential pool of companies that could bid for contracts. Also pissed off quite a few of the already entrenched ones :)
It's like a macro version of the story told in Capt. David Marquet's book Turn the Ship Around! Huge piles of bureaucracy, complexity, and waste build up in an organization risk avoidance is allowed to become the primary goal.
Hawaii Information Consortium (I guess it's now, NIC Hawaii, https://nichawaii.egov.com/), which is a subsidiary of NIC.
HIC was a great company to work for, as was NIC from the limited interactions I had with the larger corporate powers that be. Most websites/services were provided for free to the state / state agencies, instead relying on small fees per transaction on some of the stuff we did, to fund the work that didn't have transactions (I forget the amount, but we're talking something like 50c per transaction).
Being free was a key incentive to getting various agencies to come on-line.
As with many government related procurement systems, there is so much paranoia about abuse, and desire not to repeat various disasters from the past, that the system has by perceived necessity become complicated.
Of course it makes it frightfully expensive to the degree that few companies can actually throw the resources at it to be able to navigate it. The lack of competition can result in projects costing a large amount of money, and the buyers in the agencies having no real options to look elsewhere.
At an e-government company I worked for, we a service for the state that helped companies navigate the state's procurement system. We created a centralised place for all data to be gathered by the applicant, generating all the forms they needed, and provided a way for the applicant to track the state of their application. It introduced quite a change for the state, dramatically widening the potential pool of companies that could bid for contracts. Also pissed off quite a few of the already entrenched ones :)