As you've started to see—and the government likes to tout this fact—they've done one of them. They did the open-by-default procurement, and I guess it was about three months, tip to toe.
You bring the business unit that's actually going to use the technology, team them with the IT unit, team them with the procurement unit, team them with the legal unit, and put them all in a room together. That's as opposed to the business unit sending something to the IT unit, which sends something to procurement, which sends something to legal, which then says, “Oh, no, this part you can't do.” Then they have to send the paperwork back and forth. That is what disrupts the time frame.
You get everybody working in a room. It's essentially the agile principle of go lean, get everybody in the room, and focus on what the outcome or the output is supposed to be. Don't focus so much on what you think the right technology is to provide the service, but on the outcome: “We want this to be able to do that”. Then you're going to open up the door to more and more bidders.
There's no reason we should continue to see 200-page RFPs, and I've heard ministers declare it already: “No more 200-page RFPs.” We should continue to see 200-page RFPs. We continue to see 300 and 400 IT specifications and requirements built into RFPs. The SMEs can't survive the amount of time required to invest into a procurement, to go through what all the requirements are and to review those requirements. It's taking them from what should be a three- to four-month window into something that goes well over a year, sometimes two years or even three years.
You need to focus on the outcome and say, “We need this product to be able to do this. It must meet these eight or nine requirements.” You get out of saying, “The technological specifications are such and such,” because these go on forever. What ends up happening when you specify the types of technology and say it must be this, that, and the other is that you cut away half the marketplace. Rather than inviting more bids and more innovation to the table, by being prescriptive and saying, “We want this type of solution, this way,” you're going to cut out half of the marketplace, so you're cutting down. We're seeing procurements that we feel should attract 15 to 20 bidders going down to one, two, or three bidders.
Right now, it's almost a game of survival of the fittest, as opposed to an open, fair, and competitive marketplace that the government puts out by saying “We need this type of solution.” Then you'd get multiple bidders on it.
If Amazon can go out and say, “We're going to spend”—I don't know how many—“billions of dollars and employ 50,000 to 55,000 new people,” and do that in an eight-page RFP, which they sent out to cities, there's no reason we can't have 10- or even 15-page RFPs, as opposed to 200 pages.