If you’re a government official with knowledge about your local gov’s procurement process or data, we want to hear from you — please take 10 minutes to fill out our Local Gov Procurement Survey.
With nearly 60 percent of senior-level government IT officials in a recent Government Technology survey citing the public procurement process as a significant barrier to innovation, improving procurement is a core issue to our work at Code for America. And over the last couple of months, Code for America’s Peer Network has held a series of discussions regarding various challenges, workarounds, and strategies for navigating the IT procurement process. From Clay Johnson, founder of Screendoor (formerly Procure.io), to Mark Headd, Chief Data Officer of Philadelphia, Peer Network members from cities around the country and other civic innovators have shared both challenges and strategies for making local IT procurement more transparent, efficient, and cost-effective. And throughout these discussions one thing has remained clear — the procurement process is not. Policies vary widely between municipalities, often with idiosyncratic loopholes, thresholds, and exemptions. In order to move forward, we need a fuller understanding of the existing procurement policy landscape.
Code for America, The Sunlight Foundation, and Omidyar Network have partnered to take the next step in tackling the challenge of improving IT procurement. Today, we’re launching an effort to gather more information on how local governments handle purchasing in IT. The survey asks about public availability of procurement policy, relevant formal and informal IT acquisition thresholds, and the separate challenges of procurement as they pertain to involved cities.
Local government officials: take the Local Gov Procurement Survey and help us understand your procurement process.
With so much variation between municipalities, we’re counting on you to share your policies and insight so we can better understand the policy landscape. We hope this survey will be an effective tool centralizing and organizing data that we can share with you to further demystify government IT purchasing. Government officials can find the survey here. Join cities who have already shared this crucial information with us and take the next steps in improving procurement in municipal government.
Read the Sunlight Foundation’s announcement here.
Questions? Comments? Hit us up @codeforamerica.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.