Procurement is another constraint. It's a bottleneck, because I'm asking them to manage a 200-page RFP, which takes, on average, a year and a half to create.
We don't have to do RFPs that way. We don't have to specify how exactly everything is going to work. We have to say, look, Shared Services wants to create this desired outcome. That's what I want. Now tell me how to do it. You tell me, in the bid, how to do it. I'm not going to tell you how to do it, because I can't get all the details. You tell me how.
Then, you know what? Instead of awarding it to one, let's award it to a couple. You can come in; you're so smart, you've told us how we can do it, so now implement it. But don't implement it for 350,000 people. Implement it for 50 people. And we need you to do that in the next three months. I might have three vendors that are short-listed doing that.
I love all the vendors. I think they are wonderful. But I wouldn't believe them. They can't look at a prescriptive RFP and actually bid on it and know what's going to happen, so they try to contain the scope. If they don't bid, they are out $40 million for 10 years. So they have to bid, and then they get in this situation. Of course they know that as soon as they bid, they are going to be in change control right after the tender is let. They're going to say, “Well, you didn't specify that.” The government, every time, says, “Gee, so how much does that cost?” It's $300—or $3 million. That's because you can't get it all, right?