Government contracts - is this the end?
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Austerity is the watchword following the United Kingdom government’s huge cost-cutting spending review – and private sector contractors will be one of the main victims. What can infopros do to help, and are they managing things better on the other side of the Atlantic?

Just how vulnerable companies are as a result of the spending review (outline at http://digbig.com/5bcrrg) has been spelt out by the accountancy firm Baker Tilly. Recording a fall in sales among a quarter of Britain’s largest companies in advance of the cuts, it warned that some suppliers into the public sector would be directly at risk, and advised them to assess and capture data on the losses they might face if government contracts were cancelled (http://digbig.com/5bcrrh).

One contribution that information managers can make is at least to ensure that their companies know what public sector business is still available and how to grab it. In Europe, a key source of this intelligence is Tenders Electronic Daily; familiar to many information professionals, it provides daily details of some 1,500 public procurement notices across the European Union, with alerting services bolted on (http://digbig.com/5bcrrk). But that’s just the start of the bureaucratic hoop-jumping process.

So now the EU has launched eCERTIS, a service to help potential tenderers identify the various certificates and other documents that the EU’s different member states (and some related countries such as Turkey or Norway) might require (http://digbig.com/5bcrrm). It’s all helpful but it’s very top down, and it’s only the bare official version.

In the United States, meanwhile, Bloomberg is tooling up to inform business comprehensively about what its government is doing, including not only the usual lobbying fodder but procurement information as well. Soft launched earlier this year (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e30389 for background), Bloomberg Government benefits from its earlier purchase of Eagle Eye Publishers (background at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e28192), the ‘leading commercial provider of federal procurement and grant business intelligence’, as it describes itself (http://digbig.com/5bcrrp). And in being able to create the product at all (http://about.bgov.com/), Bloomberg also profits at least to some extent from the longstanding US culture of freedom of information.

Taking its cue from the US government’s data.gov initiative (http://www.data.gov), the UK government has recently launched its own data.gov.uk (http://www.data.gov.uk), a resource into which government departments and agencies deposit datasets for others to exploit – whether commercially or pro bono. It’s done on the basis of a simple Creative Commons-type Open Government Licence (http://digbig.com/5bcrrr), and if the dataset you want isn’t there, you can ask a new Public Sector Transparency Board to try to get it released (http://digbig.com/5bcrrt).

So – who’s going to be the first to create a resource to help European companies secure whatever public sector contracts are still going? The race is on.

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