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Great Acquisition Suggestion Posted on Shared Services – Idea Scale

A co-worker of mine just posted a great suggestion to the Federal CIO’s Shared Services initiative that’s on Ideas Scale. Take a look at it and vote – unless the Feds do this….create standardized data sets and make them public … they are the txpayer will continue to be held hostage to a few very expensive proprietary infrastructure applications. Link:

http://sharedservices.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Standards-Based-Acquisition-Ensures-Small-Business-Innovation/91364-17561

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GovLoop

Really like this one. If you have standard schemas for the data sets and formats, it allows much easier integration whether it’s done by government or 3rd parties.

For example, with acquisition data, there are 4 to 5 different systems with data in various different formats which makes it costly to integrate.

Peter – you would know better but isn’t there 4-5 separate systems – FPDS, USAspending, CCR and others to keep track of contract actions, vendors, spending

Peter G. Tuttle

Thanks for the comment, Steve. Yep, there are a bunch of reporting databases that track acquisition spend, etc. Mostly they feed from FPDS-NG. What’s killing the Feds is the lack of data and transactional standardization which impacts multiple systems. If the finance, acquisition, asset, HR, or whatever systems, all use the same data formats and business-logic transmission rules, then multiple vendor solutions could accomplish what only a few very large ERP-type systems are supposdly doing now. How’s that working these days, eh? Integration of disparate systems is not easy, but it will be somewhat more straight-forward if the data gods all get onto the same page. Now that we are going to the cloud, we need to figure all this out pretty quickly. Cheers and have a great weekend/holiday. Pete