Canada’s procurement process for purchasing goods and services for federal ministries and agencies really is the elephant in the room: it’s big and ponderous, with reams of paperwork taking sometimes years to fulfil.
But Ottawa is taking a page from the entrepreneur’s playbook in a bid to turn the elephant into a race horse.
On Sept. 13 at Communitech in Kitchener, 10 enterprising Canadian bidders will appear before a “pitch panel” — a staple of the innovation culture — arguing the merits of their best solution to improving Canada’s Open by Default pilot information portal.
The pilot portal is an undertaking by the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, led by Alex Benay, named Canada’s Chief Information Officer earlier this year. The Open by Default pilot intends to reduce the firewall between the federal custodians of a vast trove of data and documents, and those members of the public, academe and the business community who seek to access that material.
Participating in the “agile procurement pilot” are four federal players: Canadian Heritage with 44 documents; Environment and Climate Change Canada with 159 documents; Natural Resources Canada with 103 documents and Treasury Board with 235 documents. The material, in formats as varied as PDFs, PowerPoints or Docs, ranges from Canadian Heritage infographics on hate crimes to an Environment and Climate Change Canada presentation on Arctic sea ice decline and its impacts on shipping.
The challenge is to come up with an open source solution to improve the ability to find and retrieve such documents, through the existing Open Government website.
Comparatively speaking, the process has been moving at a gallop: it was advertised in July, and after an August webinar, the 70 interested parties were trimmed to 10 finalists who will make their final pitch Sept. 13 in Kitchener. The winner gets a $75,000 contract. Not a huge contract, but the first step in what could be a ground-breaking process in government openness and transparency, says Karin Fuller, acting manager with Treasury Board’s chief information officer branch.
“This is an untried process. We’re going to take small bites and see how they taste.”
Fuller says, “The old-world way of business” is to “identify all of our problems and how we’d like them solved — which is half the work.” The agile procurement pilot, she says, “is a challenge-based procurement: These are problems we have identified ... Why don’t you tell us how to solve them?”
The object, says Fuller, is “to be agile and be reactive.” The government hopes that this lean bidding process will appeal to Canada’s small- and medium-sized enterprises, and will be a learning opportunity for both Canadian business and the government of Canada.
Canada’s Open Data Exchange (ODX), welcomes the agile procurement pilot as an opportunity to implement good digital strategy.
ODX managing director, Kevin Tuer, says, “The government procurement process, which hasn't changed for decades, is prime for a digital makeover. As an active participant in the procurement process, the private sector needs to be consulted and included in the process.”
Fuller says the agile procurement pilot shows that there is a willingness for change, and a desire for collaboration with the private sector that will lead to future innovation.
Ottawa wants to level the playing field “so that people who are on the cutting edge of some of the work we’d like to be doing, could be directing us and be helping push us into places we don’t even know we need to go yet.”
Helping the SME community make the portal pilot a success will be the document custodians themselves, says Fuller: “There’s a lot of goodwill out there and the people toiling away inside the walls of government do it because they want Canada to be a great place. To do that, you need to talk to people living in Canada and share what you’re doing with them.”