All Learning Content
Local Council Provides Free Training on Winning Public Contracts
Oct 19, 2018
Local council Cheshire East is holding free procurement training workshops to help business people with public sector contracts. The procurement training sessions are for local businesses and are designed to support small to medium-sized enterprises and create an opportunity to secure a portion of...
Vietnam To Open Public Procurement Market
Oct 19, 2018
Viet Nam will open up its public procurement market after the Viet Nam-EU free trade agreement (EVFTA) comes into effect, writes Vietnam.net. The opening of the market will also provide opportunities for Vietnamese contractors to reach the EU’s large public procurement market. The agreement is...
Insourcing or Outsourcing – no place for political ideology
Oct 19, 2018
In the latest edition of The Catalyst, Ken Cole, FCIPS, looks at the insource/outsource debate. In the light of the Carillion failure, some public bodies have started the process of in-sourcing, even if the contracts are not necessarily failing, but because of political ideology, he says. And he...
Small Business Set-Asides Not Required Under NETCENTS-2, Says GAO
Oct 18, 2018
The Air Force’s large NETCENTS-2 IDIQ vehicle did not require orders to be set-aside under the small business pool, except for orders valued between the micro-purchase threshold and simplified acquisition threshold.
In a recent decision, the GAO held that although the NETCENTS-2 contract in...
EcoProcura 2018 — Conference Highlights, Interviews and Procura+ Winners
Oct 16, 2018
EcoProcura 2018, the international conference on sustainable, strategic, circular and innovation public procurement, took place earlier this month in the Netherlands. We couldn’t attend unfortunately, but here are some of the highlights from the event we thought you might find of interest.
Dr....
SmallGovCon Week in Review: October 8-12, 2018
Oct 13, 2018
As the workweek comes to a close, our thoughts are with everyone who has been affected by Hurricane Michael.
In government contracts news, there was plenty happening this week. In the latest SmallGovCon Week in Review, three people have been indicted on charges relating to procurement fraud, a...
Public Spend Forum’s Public Procurement Weekly Roundup
Oct 12, 2018
Google drops plans to compete for JEDI while IBM recently submitted a bid protest over the $10 billion cloud contract and HHS experiments with blockchain to transform acquisition. All this and more in Public Spend Forum’s Weekly Roundup for October 12, 2018.
IBM Protesting Pentagon’s JEDI...
UK Department for Work and Pensions Is ‘Overall Winner’ of CIPS Supply Management Awards
Oct 12, 2018
On October 10 the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions claimed the 2018 CIPS Supply Management Awards Europe ultimate accolade, taking the star prize of overall winner. Networked source-to-pay solutions, e-invoicing and innovative financing services global provider Basware was celebrating its...
Improving Government IT Through Effective Cyber Security Procurement
Oct 12, 2018
When it comes to buying cyber security, it’s hard to know where to even start. A constantly changing threat environment and the diversity of government IT networks make it complicated to determine how cyber security fits into the procurement lifecycle. In situations like this, a good first step...
A Government Contractor Crosses Over to USDS
Oct 11, 2018
Recently I was working on a blog on the spread of civic tech. One of the people discussed in the blog was Kelly O’Connor, who, I discovered, had come to the U.S. Digital Service three years ago from the government contracting community. O’Connor spent eight years working at Deloitte, followed...
Another Public-Sector Procurement Fiasco Emerges
Oct 11, 2018
The UK Government announced in 2015 it was replacing its emergency services communications network to provide an improved service across England, Scotland and Wales. It was supposed to generate savings or more than £200million a year by being more efficient and effective. But a significant delay...
From Transactions to Changemaking – Rethinking Partnerships Between the Public and Private Sectors
Oct 11, 2018
New Local Government Network (NLGN) is an independent think tank that seeks to transform UK public services. It has published a report on the government’s inability to capture detailed information on procurement with the private sector and why that is problematic. Without better data, government...
