Technology vendors that do business with the state of California want to know who is winning contracts, and how much those contracts are worth. But getting that information can be a chore that requires placing a phone call to a procurement official, filing a records request or even visiting an office building to look up a bid award document.
That data could finally be at the public's fingertips in a year or two, on a website. The portal is one of the last, big components of the Financial Information System for California (FI$Cal) project.
"Procurement transparency is the last piece that we are in the process of planning now. What the outcome of this transparency will be — think of this as a website where people can go, download non-confidential procurement data, look at the charts [of] where our money is going, which items are we buying and which vendors are getting work," said Subbarao Mupparaju, the chief information officer of FI$Cal, during a session at the CIO Academy event last week in Sacramento.
Basically the website as it's imagined would enable the general public to create self-service visualizations of the state's procurement data.
Already, Mupparaju said FI$Cal is working on an internal system that puts analytics on top of the financial system's data. The analytics system, which is now live but still in the beginning stages, will allow state departments and agencies to see where there could be opportunities for strategic sourcing or savings via contracts, and enable tracking of certifications and Small Business and Disabled Veteran Business Enterprise targets.
"We are actually working on providing some data — clean data — to support our DGS procurement team, to figure out opportunities to save money," Mupparaju said.
If it's successful, the transparency website would be a welcome addition for California's vendor and supplier community. Since the state transitioned to its new one-stop procurement portal (called Cal eProcure) in 2016, some companies and consultants have told Techwire that it's difficult to glean procurement and contract data from that website. The old financial data system, known as SCPRS — State Contract and Procurement Registration System — had issues of its own, and the data was released to the public on an Excel spreadsheet.
There's value in the ability to follow the market. A few companies have told Techwire that they look forward to a day when they can easily track the status of IT procurements from start to finish — from the release of the bid document, all the way to the contract award. Basically, knowing which company (or competitor) won a specific contract, and the dollar value of that contract. It's possible to track that information now, but it can take a lot of legwork.
Companies will have to wait, though. According to the project schedule, the public-facing transparency website won't go live until 2019. The project plan explains the proposed timeline:
"In July 2018, the Transparency Website will go live and begin automatically extracting/capturing FI$Cal transactions as intended. At this point, FI$Cal functionality will be fully implemented, and state entities will be entering all transactions in the system. In July 2019, after the system has captured a full year of transactions, the Transparency Website will open to the public, allowing public users to view important financial information for the state. Under this plan, the Transparency Website will have a complete record of financial data at the time of its public release."
