Collaborate Lately?
I know there are a growing number of us across government who are using collaboration tools to engage with industry (or even within government) as we formulate our procurements – connecting and sharing ideas before going through the official acquisition process… Does that describe you? We need your help!!
Have you or someone in your agency or company used collaborative technology (i.e., social media tools) such as a wiki, discussion board, challenge or blog to share or get information during the pre-solicitation process? We are looking for some ‘success stories’ to demonstrate the value of pre-acquisition collaboration, and to show folks new to the idea how this could benefit their agency, their program or an upcoming acquisition. We also hope to find some examples that demonstrate how others could set up collaboration environments themselves.
Would love to hear:
What do you find has worked best in reaching out to invite industry to participate in the conversations? How do you keep them engaged?
What types of "conversations" have you engaged in with industry to conduct market research or to obtain industry input on your agency needs prior to issuing a solicitation? What benefits have your realized? What challenges have you experienced?
For those of you in industry - what benefits and challenges are you experiencing?
What else can you share that will help us as a government improve the dialogue with industry or others in government to improve our requirements and ultimately improve mission success and program outcomes?
Other ideas to consider?
Please let us know by sharing your experiences here! Your feedback will help us educate, coach, and encourage government to continue to collaborate in order to achieve the greatest value possible from each and every acquisition. Thanks for your help. The tribe is marching forward!
Tags: acquisition, collaboration, solicitation, technology
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Brett Husbands on
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Mary,
What type of collaboration you are looking to do? This posting http://personaldemocracy.com/node/20336 provides a good view of the various stages, and types of collaboration. Each type has different methods, outcomes, and success stories. And this is not just a challenge in the government space, perhaps finding examples of the type of collaboration you want to do anywhere (including outside government) would be helpful.
If you frame the question more specifically at a specific type of collaboration for a specific outcome we may be able to find more specific success stories, as things that make one collaboration successful, may make another fail. for example the success of wikis in Victoria Australia for collaborating on long term plans almost certainly had different reasons for success than the expert feedback mechanisms in Peer2Patent
Brett Husbands
Firmstep
(Also on an academic bent I'd recommend Cass Sunstein's Infotopia re Jury Concordet theorem and how the methods of crowdsourcing can lead to groupthink and other sorts of bias)
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Permalink Reply by Erica Schachtell on -
We were faced with the challenge of creating an open, transparent, collaborative and continually adaptive forest planning process. It didn't take long for us to realize that we had to build onto all of the success stories at forest and regional levels, by embracing emerging technologies. So we created a ning site (http://ourforestplace.ning.com/) and a wiki (http://livingassessment.wikispaces.com/). To avoid heaps and heaps of red tape, we had to make sure these are clearly NOT official USDA Forest Service sites. These are partnership-based collaborative efforts that will open up the dialogue about forest assessments and planning to everyone who cares.
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Permalink Reply by Andrew Krzmarzick on -
I posted this link on the main comment wall, but thought I should log it with the rest of the ideas here...
Gadi Ben Yehuda offers several ideas for fostering "a new culture of acquisition" in this terrific blog post:
http://www.govloop.com/profiles/blogs/seven-management-imperatives-5
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