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SmallGovCon Week in Review: October 15-19, 2018

Oct 20, 2018
I had a great time last week at the National HUBZone Conference in Chantilly, Virginia. If you were there, please reach out to say hi! In this week’s edition of SmallGovCon Week In Review, we’ll look at GSA’s new eBuy pilot program, insight into the SBA OIG’s 8(a) eligibility findings,...

Public Spend Forum’s Public Procurement Weekly Roundup

Oct 19, 2018
Microsoft is the latest major tech company to come under the scrutiny of its own employees for using innovation to support controversial missions of the government, and the USDS believes using tools like Slack, Skype, Google Suite and others could free up time for federal workers to focus more on...

Police Force to Pool Procurement Resources in Collaboration Programme

Oct 19, 2018
The English southeast county of Essex is planning to pool procurement resources between six other police forces in a bid to reduce costs and gain better spending power. The 7 Force Collaboration Programme is made up of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Kent,...

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...

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...

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...

CCS More Than Doubles Planned Spending on eSourcing Platform

Oct 11, 2018
UK Government buying organisation, Crown Commercial Service, is replacing its eSourcing platform in a framework it initially drew up worth £4 million to the winning bidder. Now that the contract notice has been issued, CCS expects the cumulative value of the deal across its four lots to be worth...