Agencies urged to agree on e-purchasing standards

If federal agencies all followed the same rulebook for electronic purchasing, prices would drop and efficiency would increase, according to a new report.

The findings emerged from a report commissioned by the General Services Administration on the second phase of the Catalog Interoperability Pilot (CIP), a joint experiment undertaken by several federal agencies and CommerceNet, a non-profit industry association representing e-commerce interests.

Creating an interagency system for the purchase of high-volume, low-price items has been the focus of a task force of the Electronic Processes Initiative Committee (EPIC) of the President's Management Council. In its strategic plan, EPIC set the ambitious goal of seeing all federal agencies offer end-to-end commercial processing of payment, accounting and performance reporting information electronically by the year 2001.

"The technology is available and it works," said Mary Mitchell, deputy assistant administrator of GSA's Office of Electronic Commerce. "Agencies must, however, agree on a few common practices to reduce the effort required to make technology more widely available to government buyers."

The report found that buyers' experience was "significantly below expectations." Divergent security features, for example, prevented some participants from accessing the electronic catalogs. In another flaw, data was not organized consistent with the pilot's coding system.

To address these and other concerns, the authors recommended that the following steps be taken:

• Require all products to be coded using the United Nations/Standard Product and Services Code.
• Develop local, agency-specific business process server requirements, including agency procurement rules, and search and aggregation rules.
• Develop standards for use of interoperable catalogs, similar to those used by banks for funds transfer.
• Provide system monitoring or analysis capability to identify and address incomplete catalog searches.
• Investigate registering government catalogs with a commercial registry service to ensure that catalogs meet all necessary requirements for interoperability.

The report is available online at http://egov.gov.