With regards to "The challenge in identifying the vendor only relates to external stakeholders. Agreement Officers executing OTs through a consortia are privy to that information."
I would argue that this is true, but external stakeholders are important here. It's hard to evaluate the potentially quite positive role OTAs are playing for the industrial base when the reported prime doesn't provide visibility beyond the consortium level. The Agreement Officers have key information they need, but it's not their job to track across the enterprise. Apparently reporting systems are part of the problem here, but I think this is a challenge worth the attention to solve.
Greg, agree that the DoD and acquisition research community can always benefit from greater insights into emerging practices like OTA use to assess adoption, best practices, and systemic issues to enable continuous improvement. The challenge is to not impose a crushing amount of reporting and oversight on practices designed to be rapid and light weight. The key is finding the right balance.
Agreed on the balance. My selfish interest is clear, I always want more data and I'd like NAICS, claimant program codes, and PSE codes when applicable in my OTA yesterday please. But as you say there is a balance to be struck and perhaps these and other FPDS codes are a bridge too far and start to lose the benefits of OTA. The follow on connections are interesting but implementing them right, especially given the lack of FPDS analogue, will be tricky and are worth careful thinking.
That said, I think "who is the team actually doing the work" is clearly on the necessary side of the line even if I'd be open to a convincing counterargument on all the fields I mention above. (Moshe Schwartz and Stephanie Halcrow to a good job unpacking the issues on page 28 of their Power of Many report https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4405137) .
The consortium management companies have often raised the issue of transparency versus visibility, but I think that's a distraction from more important questions. How can it be done in a way that minimizes friction? Do we need an IT investment? Does the System for Award Management need to be able to churn out new unique entity IDs for teaming arrangements? Do we need a clear rule on who is the lead in a team? Should we instead have a secondary source that was a one-to-many list of all consortium members participating in a given transaction? I'd prefer some of these solutions over others but there's room for balance and compromise here. But I think this particular bit a data should be a question of *how* not *whether*.
With regards to "The challenge in identifying the vendor only relates to external stakeholders. Agreement Officers executing OTs through a consortia are privy to that information."
I would argue that this is true, but external stakeholders are important here. It's hard to evaluate the potentially quite positive role OTAs are playing for the industrial base when the reported prime doesn't provide visibility beyond the consortium level. The Agreement Officers have key information they need, but it's not their job to track across the enterprise. Apparently reporting systems are part of the problem here, but I think this is a challenge worth the attention to solve.
Greg, agree that the DoD and acquisition research community can always benefit from greater insights into emerging practices like OTA use to assess adoption, best practices, and systemic issues to enable continuous improvement. The challenge is to not impose a crushing amount of reporting and oversight on practices designed to be rapid and light weight. The key is finding the right balance.
Thanks for the response Pete.
Agreed on the balance. My selfish interest is clear, I always want more data and I'd like NAICS, claimant program codes, and PSE codes when applicable in my OTA yesterday please. But as you say there is a balance to be struck and perhaps these and other FPDS codes are a bridge too far and start to lose the benefits of OTA. The follow on connections are interesting but implementing them right, especially given the lack of FPDS analogue, will be tricky and are worth careful thinking.
That said, I think "who is the team actually doing the work" is clearly on the necessary side of the line even if I'd be open to a convincing counterargument on all the fields I mention above. (Moshe Schwartz and Stephanie Halcrow to a good job unpacking the issues on page 28 of their Power of Many report https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4405137) .
The consortium management companies have often raised the issue of transparency versus visibility, but I think that's a distraction from more important questions. How can it be done in a way that minimizes friction? Do we need an IT investment? Does the System for Award Management need to be able to churn out new unique entity IDs for teaming arrangements? Do we need a clear rule on who is the lead in a team? Should we instead have a secondary source that was a one-to-many list of all consortium members participating in a given transaction? I'd prefer some of these solutions over others but there's room for balance and compromise here. But I think this particular bit a data should be a question of *how* not *whether*.