Two more articles provide more information about the SARA panel's decisions.
First, the panel believes that by using commercial business practices, competition will increase. Here how the article puts it
...move away from time-and-materials contracts because they take too much effort to oversee. Instead, the panel favors performance-based acquisitions. But other significant recommendations include setting up a new General Services Administration schedule for professional services, redefining stand-alone commercial services, applying the three-bid minimum requirement for Defense Department services over the simplified acquisition threshold governmentwide, and amending the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) to improve transparency in government contracting.
The
second article says the panel believes that the acquisition workforce doesn't know who it is and that they are not being sufficiently trained. In addition, they will conduct a study to see, among other things, whether there should be a government-wide version of DAU.
Of course, since DAU has an organic "systems acquisition" leaning (notice who their
Defense AT&L Magazine is aimed at), they are missing helping those of us who spend the other 60% of federal procurement dollars!
From their writer's guidelines at the end of the magazine:
The purpose of Defense AT&L magazine is to instruct members of the DoD acquisition, technology & logistics (AT&L) workforce and defense industry on policies, trends, legislation, senior leadership changes, events, and current thinking affecting
program management and defense systems acquisition [my italics], and to disseminate other information pertinent to the professional development and education of the DoD Acquisition Workforce.
Perhaps a services acquisition university might be a good thing. Let's see what they propose.
