Background
Table of contents
General Idea
In finance, a prospectus is a document that describes a security to potential investors and contains information about the security’s costs, objectives, risks and performance. The goal for this project is to provide an automated capability for government acquisition personnel to receive information on current and prospective suppliers that reflects the suitability and risks for investment of taxpayer funds (e.g., supplier capability, capacity, financial viability, risks). This information might be used throughout the life of government contracts to understand industrial partners, but may be especially useful during market research, prior to negotiations, while making contractor responsibility determinations and prior to exercising contract options.
One of the primary objectives for this project is to integrate prospectus-type information into contract writing systems, and thus provide information to contracting personnel within their workflow. The Internal Revenue Service, for example, found that acquisition personnel spend hours on each contract award compiling information and drafting contractor responsibility determinations. For many agencies this process repeats tens of thousands of times each year. One solution that has been proposed, and is growing in popularity among multiple agencies, is to utilize robotic process automation (bots) to screenshot government sites commonly accessed for responsibility determinations and then e-mail this information to government buyers. This is an improvement over existing processes, but only represents a partial solution for providing intelligence on suppliers.
Principals that we believe are important:
Be informative but be concise.
Contrast to regulations and rules (e.g., FAR).
Be convenient.
Reduce the need to manually visit and search external sites or otherwise interact with systems that are outside of the contract writing workflow. This means simplifying processes without sacrificing the value of those processes.
Don’t be cumbersome.
Present contracting personnel with information compiled into a single document, with outbound links for additional detail.
Be accessible.
Information should be universally accessible, meaning (at a minimum) compliance to Section 508 requirements.