The simplest answer to your first question on the agencies and whether we bring them together is yes, and doing so is incredibly effective. More specifically, there are a few tools that we use. We have a chief acquisition officer round table, a meeting where we do bring all those heads of the procuring centres together, just as you mentioned.
We also, within each agency, have an individual whose title is a bit of a mouthful. It's the office of small and disadvantaged business utilization. OSDBU is the acronym. That person is charged with making sure that small businesses are getting their seat at the table and in all conversations within that agency.
Last--and this is still on the agency part, and I'll get to the small business part--we have those procurement centre representatives sitting with the people actually issuing the contracts and making sure that where the rubber meets the road it's actually happening, that small businesses are getting their fair share.
So it's from the top, in terms of strategy level and round table discussions, all the way down to the individual contract level that we're educating, monitoring, and helping agencies buy from small businesses.
On the small business side, there are a number of things we do. We have a number of field offices spread throughout the country. Small business owners can come in there for business development counselling, for education and resources, for those types of things. We put an immense amount of data and information online, in the federal business opportunity, or FedBizOpps, website and on a number of other websites, which has been helpful.
Then last--because sometimes you can reach the point where there's almost too much information out there, and it's very difficult for a small business owner to get to all of it--we help facilitate what we call business matchmaking events. At these we'll bring together a group of small businesses and agencies and sometimes large businesses in a room or in a convention hall and allow them to get to know each other and meet each other and understand who can provide what goods and services or, from a small business perspective, who is most likely to be buying what I'm selling. Because it's very hard as a small business owner to get through the process and understand what government agency, whether it be federal or state as was mentioned before, and what large business may be issuing subcontracts after winning a prime award. So we want to facilitate that flow as much as possible.