Open Dialogue on Improving How to Do Business with the Federal Government Ideas

Establish upfront timelines for procurements and establish a performance metric or incentive for meeting those timelines. There is currently no incentive to meet procurement schedules. Extensions and delays should be the exception, not the norm. Delays are not only inefficient to meeting the mission goals but the longer cycles also hinder innovation and cost money. Industry requires predictability to manage their ...more »

Government has been doing great things on setting up policies like "Cloud First". Same must be considered for "Small Business First" for each and every procurement and have those evaluation/findings report publish to small business so, businesses can improve on how decisions were made. This provides opportunity for small business to improve and extend services as expected.

Mid-tier businesses have valuable government contracting experience and power the economy by subcontracting with small business concerns. Prohibiting these dollars from counting towards an agency’s socioeconomic goals artificially reduces the apparent government investment in such companies. As a result, SBA goals are treated with heightened importance, creating greater exclusion of sources in open competition and increasing ...more »

Agencies should have more flexibility and discretion in defining and using size standards by NAICS code and ownership category to solve the ‘mid-tier trap’ that limits participation and reduces the value created by the small business program. Some departments have recently recognized the value and challenges of mid-tier businesses, many of which are successful graduates of the small business program. When successful ...more »

I noticed there are not a lot of different opportunities available for WOSBs across various NAICS codes. I receive alerts from FBO for my NAICS codes. However, I haven't received many that are set aside for WOSBs. There needs to be more opportunities across different NAICS codes. I know there are many NAICS codes that are eligible for WOSB set aside, but I haven't seen many contracts advertised that fall under many of ...more »

The FAR should reflect best practices in the private sector and many state construction (15 or so) programs by requiring prime contractors to list/name primary subcontractors in low-price award procedures (like proposed in HR 1942). Since the 1984 Competition in Contracting Act, federal agencies have run away from construction project low-bid prime contract award procedures because of the claims and disputes that were ...more »

Question 1: How can we make doing business with the government easier and less costly for small businesses, minority businesses, new entrants, and non-traditional government contractors? Answer 1: So far I have not encountered any costs with trying to start a business, because I am doing extension research first. I do see there are a lot of costs to get started. Question 2: If you are a small business, minority ...more »

Issue: Major information technology (IT) investments frequently exceed original cost and schedule estimates and, in some cases, deliver very little useable capability. One key driver of these outcomes is the continued preference to develop solutions in-house rather than structure programs to allow for increased use of existing commercial solutions that can be rapidly deployed, often under firm-fixed price arrangements. ...more »

If a small business has a good service or product that the federal government can use then the first two major barriers must be addressed for more participation are: 1. Cash flow for 12 -36 months to cover G&A- Fringe & Over Head depending on industry needs to be easily accessible. If a company jumps through all the hoops to become a federal contractor then to survive long enough for repeated contract awards to provide ...more »

We recommend that SBA increase the Personal Networth definition to $5 million, in addition remove the required Audited financials unless the organization has revenue of over $100 million.

The time is right for a public policy discussion contrasting the SWOT for fully outsourcing government IT - no longer would government own, maintain, and upgrade IT infrastructure or application development, but instead private industry would provide government with secure cloud-based DaaS/SaaS that would accelerate commercial as well as government security, convenience, affordability, and trust compared to ownership. ...more »

In addition to requiring a pre solicitation phase in all procurements over a certain threshold to be determined by Agency Contracting Head, I would recommend a more involved use of performance based acquisition practices for initial strategy adoption and O&M efforts in information technology. This includes the occasional coupling with incentive based contracting where appropriate. When these parts of the FAR are used ...more »