AIIM committee focuses on Document Management (specifically, RFP management)

AIIM committee "C27, Document Management Technologies" is a good source of information regarding electronic RFP management/processes. Visit their page on the web for more info. on best practices and white papers.

CM Industry gets Recognition!

Hooray for contracts professionals and in particular those interested in applying their skillset towards a professional career connected to the computing industry, as a leading software provider has recognized "Contract Specialists" as a broad category on its career selection page!

The headline is explained by the fact that following the off-line registration for MS' "Visual Studio C++ 2010 Express" edition package will take on to a page requesting information about one's professional interests and background. On selecting an occupation type, a dropdown list is given to narrow the choices and contract specialist is listed as an occupation type - somewhat of a rarity in this day of endless web-form-based personal info. collections. Even most job portals seem to overlook our prominence in the job market as an industry sector.


Shame on those folks - the government knows we are 1102's in DoD terms or "purchasing/contract specialists" in the Occupational Outlook (2010/2011*) - admittedly which overlooks a significant purpose of our responsibility in many cases -- the services purchasing agent - but not Microsoft..nope! They got us in their sights as career-growth oriented professionals. Hats off to Gates men and women for knowing who the real hard-workers are. We may not have a say in using google docs vs. microsoft office live docs, but we'll know who knows we're out there when the web services battle wages on!

The occupational outlook may also refer to contract administrators /contract specialists as administrative services managers. This may come somewhat close to hitting the mark also, but often times the contract admin/specialist in a larger corporation will play a much more significant role in substantial business decision-making processes such as those with legal ramifications or impact to the strategic direction of a Division or Business Unit. Thus, may the directory be corrected in subsequent publications with any luck (smile)

Semantic Approach to Contract Management

Read the case study here
and find other great articles on this topic on Google

Why aren't standards working?

One of the things that is ailing our federal budget is unnecessary spending to 'reinvent the wheel.' Unfortunately, doing so has been a practice. The government has taken bureacratic steps to prevent this reoccurence but the various DoD components seem obstinate and are wasting taxpayers' money, states one contributor to the AFCEA publication, "SIGNAL." [citing]. I am talking about each component of the DoD - army, navy, AF - all spending money from their own budgets to develop systems that support their equipment that could be developed only once with any different source of money and applied to each branches' equipment. Perhaps two of the most notable cases are radio systems and just about all IT concepts. ..But you may also say, wait, what about the embrace of all the web 2.0 stuff? You've probably heard about GovLoop already and you may even know that the DON CIO is behind all the web 2.0 stuff, in theory (note especially the comment by erica kraft "alt+F" to find that). Although, there are some cool initiatives underway to enhance communications between the components, we have a long ways to go.

You'll have to wait on my next post until I have more comment on the nature of affairs with DoD collaboration, but I welcome your comments. Is the status of NMCI in relation to Navy's SOA Strategic Initiatives analagous to the big picture of adopting standardization and modular architecture service-wide?

City of DC using Google for Procurement Process

The District of Columbia (DC) is using google to improve their procurement process. See the comments from their CIO here. (Scroll to the bottom of the page)

Participation: babies are not freeloaders, non-participants are!

as originally posted on O'Reilly's XML Blog

One of the great disappointments of the open source movement has been the way that lazy users don’t feed changes and improvements back, but are passive recipients. And often we see open source programs reflecting the priorities of its sponsors not its users. However, the standards process (when running correctly) have procedures in place to make sure that stakeholder comments will get looked at; but just like with open source there is an enormous intertia and laziness among stakeholders to participate.

The value proposition of open source and open standards, for many organizations, is that they get something for free, but that attitude ultimately means they get something sub-optimal for free. Organizations, and governments need to consider this very strongly, who have mission critical deployments or procurement programs based on open standards or open source need to assertively, pro-actively participate in the development and maintenance efforts of those programs.

There is a great quote (I’d have to track down who from: Dan Savage?) about gay couples holding hands in public: that to some extent in order to live in the world you want to you have act as if it were there rather than waiting for it to happen outside your actions. The same is true for standards: participation is essential.

[NOTE: this was previously posted to the OReilly DEV NEWS site by mistake.]

Contracting Resource Publications

If you're going to follow updates to the FAR and the procurement process, why not follow them thru seasoned professionals, who are longer-term veterans than myself - The guys over at Wifcon (click->http://www.wifcon.com/blog/blogger.html) are pretty well-versed in contracting and would be happy to advise.