The speed of government procurement in Australia and New Zealand has caught up with the private sector thanks to the development of technology. Daniel Benad, Regional GM, Australia and New Zealand, Rimini Street, tells us how Digital Transformation has enhanced the process for the public sector.
We’ve seen many a manual task go the way of the dodo in favor of a digital alternative in the past 30 years. From the film in a camera becoming a memory card to the development of e-Tags to replace the toll booth, not much of what we did in the 1900s remains the same in 2020.
The procurement process was one of the last holdouts of its era and, many would argue, one of the reasons behind the perception of the ‘speed of government’ being slow compared to the rate of innovation within the private sector.
While the concept of procurement is valuable, particularly as a means for government agencies of all sizes to ensure transparency and probity, for a long time it was a manual process prone to red tape, delays, human error and an over-reliance on paper documents.
But the process underwent an overhaul, one which has rendered many of those archaic paper-driven processes from a century gone by as obsolete.
How archaic was it?
The average process for a vendor looking to respond to a request for tender was to physically find an advertisement in a newspaper; write to the government agency or call, requesting the documents; receiving the documents; filling them out and re-submitting prior to the deadline, all with physical documentation – no .pdfs or .docx files, but reams of paper.
This could take weeks, from end to end, and was prone to human error; a box not ticked here or a date unclearly written there could prove the difference in success or failure.
Further, procurement officers were often at the whim of things clearly out of their control, such as the post office misplacing the entire file or delivering it too late – effectively rendering the tender chances for that vendor null and void.
Your postie took a wrong turn? Well, better luck next time.
It was an all-consuming process, one which significantly slowed innovation. Governments keen to provide taxpayers with upgraded services were unable to keep pace with innovation at the same rate as the private sector could.
But that all began to change slowly within the past few decades.
While a requirement for government remained to advertise open tenders in metropolitan newspapers, organizations such as TenderLink and others would compile them, digitize them and send them to subscribers. Soon afterwards, open tenders could be found online at the likes of Austenders and state-based equivalents. Then, tender documents could at last be downloaded from a government agency and uploaded online instead of being sent by post.
And in recent years in Australia and New Zealand, there’s been a noticeable transformation that has further shortened the process from weeks down to days, and has governments close to being on pace with the private sector.
Procurement 2.0
The Digital Transformation Agency in Australia and The Department of Internal Affairs in New Zealand have created easily accessible systems the envy of many governments across the globe.
In Australia, it’s in the form of Whole of Government Agreements that are, effectively, contracts with vendors which can be quickly accessed and easily signed by any agency in Australia. With these specific services offered under a Whole of Government Agreement, there’s often no need to go through the process of a full tender anymore, including for such things as maintenance and support for software systems.
The same holds true of New Zealand which has created the Collaborative Marketplace which features similar agreements for a large and growing number of services that agencies can now access quickly and implement in the time it would normally take to undertake a full tender and the subsequent procurement and assessment process.
Each government is aiming to take the hassle out of the process and improve the speed of government while remaining transparent to the public.
Furthermore, these agreements aim to save the public purse from budget blowouts as the procurement process is significantly shorter. And vendors often offer a reduced rate for their services to attain the agreement as it lowers their barrier to government entry and reduces the resources required to develop an old-school procurement application.
Ultimately the goal of Digital Transformations of this kind is to improve flexibility and simplify the process of agencies buying technology and getting more value out of their investments.
Under the old process, a full procurement process would have to be undertaken for each contract, whereas now a contract can be accessed quickly and more affordably, with fewer resources required to do so.
It allows for the simple sourcing of everything from an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform at competitive pricing, to third party support for that very ERP to lower the annual and significant maintenance and support costs and receive dedicated, follow-the-sun services – this can help procurement professionals achieve savings targets which can then help fund additional digital initiatives for their agencies.
It may have taken a while, but the speed of government is catching up to the pace of the private sector and saving additional funds from the public purse in the process.
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