[LINK] DTO’s digital marketplace: tech today, all procurement tomorrow?

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

<brd>
The UK has been working on this sort of thing since 2012

They recently renamed their CloudStore (Cloud being a buzzword du jour)
The Digital Marketplace (Digital being the buzzword du jour)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Government_G-Cloud

Our government has been trying to improve procurement since Noah was a lad.
Current iterations are Multi Use Lists and Data Center as a Service,
(DCaaS) an initiative I worked on.
</brd>

DTO’s digital marketplace: tech today, all procurement tomorrow?
by Stephen Easton
30.08.2016
http://www.themandarin.com.au/69579-dto-spins-up-digital-marketplace-beta/

Procurement should be a marketplace, says the federal minister. The NSW
government, National Disability Insurance Agency and now the Digital
Transformation Office are all pursuing the digital marketplace concept.

The federal government’s new digital marketplace could eventually become
the standard for all kinds of procurement, but that’s a still a fair way
off, according to Digital Transformation Minister Angus Taylor.

The Digital Transformation Office fired up the new Commonwealth IT
procurement system beta yesterday with over 220 information technology
vendors on board and held a small demonstration event at its Canberra
headquarters.

“I would love to see these principles applied more broadly, because
they’re good principles,” said the minister. “Procurement should be a
marketplace, and that’s effectively what we’re doing here; we’re turning
procurement into a marketplace.”

“Without that active management it will simply be a job board, and we
don’t want it to be that.”

The government presently has no plans to transform all of procurement in
the same way. Taylor can see potential, but the new platform still needs
to prove its worth. “I think if we can get it to work in digital,
there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be trying to get it to work
elsewhere, but let’s start at the beginning and we’ll see where we can
take it,” he said.

As the project team works to rapidly adjust, improve and enhance the
beta site over coming months based on user feedback, it will also be
trying to encourage agencies to start using it.

“This is where we get to start conversations with real users, both
buyers and sellers, through their interactions with the marketplace and
their interactions with us,” said service design leader Catherine
Thompson (pictured top), who described the concept as a “curated
ecosystem” that would be actively managed and moderated.

“The principle of continuous development means that as soon as we see
something [to fix or improve], or someone asks us or provides feedback,
we are able to test it and bring it up within a day or so.”

The digital marketplace aims to make it simpler for government buyers
and for IT companies, particularly small-to-medium enterprises, to do
business. The idea is to have easily accessible information about what
the market can provide published openly, alongside public sector IT
requirements and what agencies are willing to pay for them.

Procurement officers can log in to post requirements for individual
digital specialists — locations, timelines, pay rates — or for outcomes
they want to achieve.

Thompson said this information would later be displayed on dashboards
and the site would grow into “a data-driven ecosystem [where] buyers and
sellers will be able to find price and other points that will help them
to fine-tune their offerings, and their responses”.

“The buyer’s dashboard will show what work they have underway. A short
series of guided steps will allow buyers to put together briefs
logically and easily,” she explained.

The system supports buyers approaching the whole market, a single
supplier or a shortlist, which the system can also suggest. Another
proposed feature is to have the marketplace throw up “wildcard”
suggestions too.

After evaluating the initial applications, agencies will be able to quiz
suppliers in more detail about their credentials and start deeper
discussions about more complex or specialised outcomes that might
require more contractual rigour.

“Sellers will also see how buyers are planning to evaluate them and what
the essential skills are,” said Thompson. “And they’ll be able to ask
questions before they submit their responses. It’s simple for them to
then start an application.”

The marketplace experience currently ends after the initial evaluations,
but her vision is to make it digital from end to end.
A marketplace of ideas

The platform is designed to make it simpler for agencies to buy simple
things, while still enabling more serious and in-depth discussions as
necessary. It also aims to stimulate the flow of new ideas between the
private sector and the federal government.
“We’re hoping we’ll be able to encourage suppliers to grow in an area
that best responds to our government needs.”

One new function to be trialled during the beta testing period is an
“ideation platform” that the DTO team is working on with staff from the
Department of Human Services. They will try out a few different models
to see which is most popular with agencies and tech vendors.

“The ideation platform will allow for sellers with good ideas to post
that good idea for the marketplace and have it showcased,” said
Thompson. “And because the DTO is a digital agency that also exists in
the real world, that will be combined with the ability of sellers to do
pitch days. For buyers, it will mean the ability to post your challenge
out to the marketplace.”

Agencies won’t have to be specific about an outcome they need to achieve
or even the exact kind of individual specialists they want to employ,
she said.

“The ideation platform will support more unstructured discussions, and
then a metrics platform will show us how well we’re doing in all the
other quadrants, supported by regulatory frameworks that allow us to
have these interactions in a way that’s rigorous but not prescriptive,
and a controlled environment that allows these conversations to happen
in a way that’s safe for all parties,” Thompson explained.

She said the ideas feature could also help bring small tech companies
with unique service offerings to the attention of public service
procurement officers, responding to a question from one of the select
few guests at the launch, Startup Muster founder Monica Wulff.

“I think it’s important for the marketplace to be a curated ecosystem,”
said Thompson, who apparently promised her previous employer, a small
virtual reality start-up, that she would make things easier for
companies like them.

“So it’s not going to be a set and forget, we’ll have people out there,
talking to start-ups, talking to buyers and making those creative
collaborations between the two, because without that active management
it will simply be a job board, and we don’t want it to be that. So
you’ll see a lot of activity from us in the coming months.”

The first crop of nearly 230 suppliers of tech goods and services were
brought on through the same kind of tender process as a typical supplier
panel and offer 14 capabilities between them. The majority have done
business with government before — that’s how they came across the
AusTender entry — but the plan is to make it easier for other small
players to crack the government market.

To get more on board, the DTO will run “a series of showcases,
conversations and road shows” to various start-up incubators, peak
bodies and other organisations in the world of IT sector SMEs, Thompson
said.

About 70% of the suppliers that responded to a DTO survey planned to
expand their digital capabilities in the next year, in many of the same
areas that are currently in short supply both on the digital marketplace
and in the local market in general, like agile coaching, service design
and ethical hacking.

“We’re hoping that by publishing information about upcoming
requirements, as well as briefs that enliven the marketplace, we’ll be
able to encourage suppliers to grow in an area that best responds to our
government needs,” said Thompson.

At the same time, the project team will be contacting departments to ask
them to prepare briefs that help businesses understand their broader
digital transformation plans.
Quick-smart

The digital marketplace came online several months quicker than
expected, which is “wonderful” for the minister. DTO chief executive
Paul Shetler said it was “an excellent example of how government can
work to deliver a real product used by real people very, very quickly”
when it worked in a “lean and agile” way.
“It is important that the DTO be a disruptor, but it’s also important
that it be a change manager.”

Thompson said the project had been accelerated by borrowing code from
the United Kingdom’s existing digital marketplace, which was built by
the DTO’s British equivalent, Government Digital Services.

“They provided the base code on which we’ve iterated and they also came
over to spend some time with us,” she explained. “And the principle is
that whenever we develop something they don’t have, we chuck it back
over the fence at them and they can then use it themselves.”

In the same way, others including state and territory governments or
other agencies could build on the DTO’s open-source work to make their
own digital marketplaces without having to reinvent the wheel.

Taylor placed the project into the agency’s wider role of shaking up the
Australian Public Service, and said it was “even more important” to
encourage innovation in government than in the wide economy.

“It is important that the DTO be a disruptor, but it’s also important
that it be a change manager,” the minister said.
"The Digital Marketplace is a step closer to providing a new and
exciting platform for businesses and Government to work together in a
highly creative, flexible and innovative way," says Angus Taylor.

“The Digital Marketplace is a step closer to providing a new and
exciting platform for businesses and Government to work together in a
highly creative, flexible and innovative way,” says Angus Taylor.

One thing that must change, according to Taylor, is the way the APS
thinks about procurement. He said that from talking to businesses and
his own experience before entering politics, there is “enormous
frustration involved in bad procurement processes” on both sides of the
equation.

There are four flaws in procurement processes, in Taylor’s view, which
the marketplace addresses. He believes they don’t encourage public
servants to “constantly look at new and clever ways of doing things”
that are being done in the private sector, and therefore stifle innovation.

Secondly, he says they are not “interactive” enough: “We need
procurement processes … where the buyers and sellers can talk, because
that’s what we do in the real world. And yet our systems and our
processes don’t reflect that reality that we all know is incredibly
important to getting good outcomes in our procurement.”

The minister also foreshadowed benefits from a system of accountability
that applies to agencies as buyers as well as to suppliers, sort of like
an online auction site. He suggests the adage that “you’re only as good
as your last project” might be outdated.

“Because the truth is your reputation should be built on a whole range
of projects, and a whole range of experiences people have had with you,
and what we really want is that accountability for someone’s
effectiveness as a supplier, and as a buyer, to be built into our
technology.”

Finally, Taylor claimed the digital marketplace would boost a form of
transparency “as to what we buy, as to what the seller can offer and how
we interact”.

“I’m sure we can improve,” Taylor said. “That is exactly the philosophy
we have with everything we do. We get started, we beat the blank page
and then we continually work from there, which is why, of course, it’s a
beta.”

-- 

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Sydney Australia
email: brd at iimetro.com.au
web:   www.drbrd.com
web:   www.problemsfirst.com
Blog:  www.problemsfirst.com/blog