ADI Report Outlines 7 Recommendations for Governmentwide Acquisition Contract Reform

The Alliance for Digital Innovation has released a white paper providing recommendations on how the U.S. government could update governmentwide acquisition contracts to accelerate federal agencies’ access to commercial innovation and help them carry out cybersecurity and information technology modernization efforts.

The nine-page document outlined seven recommendations to modernize the structure of GWACs and the first is focusing on the most relevant evaluation criteria.

For the first recommendation, GWAC managers should come up with an evaluation framework that prioritizes the “show, don’t tell” model and make changes to evaluation criteria to “open the aperture for nontraditional commercial innovation.”

“More emphasis should be placed on ‘opening up’ the vendor pool to non-traditional government contractors or purely commercial companies that have innovative ‘dual use’ technologies adaptable to serve government missions,” the ADI document reads.

Other recommendations discussed in the white paper are reducing administrative burdens; expanding industry engagement; leveraging commercial use cases; improving onboarding and offboarding; creating training programs to support new entrants; and revising the philosophy of teaming agreements and joint ventures.

The report also touched upon structural problems with existing GWACs and the role such contracts play in the acquisition ecosystem.

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