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The Digital Transformation Agency’s (DTA) Head of Digital Marketplace, Catherine Thompson had some important updates to share about the federal government’s crucial new procurement platform.
Speaking to an eGovernment forum at CeBIT Australia 2017, Ms Thompson spoke at length about the DTA’s role in delivering simpler and smarter procurement services to government departments, which have been previously reported on GovNews.
The Digital Marketplace is a federal government initiative designed to improve technology procurement by making it easier for suppliers to compete for a slice of the government’s annual $5 billion ICT spend, thereby improving the way government and business work together.
As a procurement ecosystem, the Digital Marketplace is meant to allow government buyers to define their requirements to which suppliers can respond and enable a two-way collaboration to take place.
And it’s been a long road in the development of the Digital Marketplace’s saturation in the procurement landscape, from the NSW government signing up, to the City of Casey in Victoria, which gave the service a good write-up.
At the conference, Ms Thompson presented statistics that she said she was pleased by, which included buyers from 120 government agencies have chosen to sign on with the Digital Marketplace, and 42 agencies have trusted the Digital Marketplace to transact with them.
“We’ve closed almost $18 million of business with them and there are about a thousand sellers either queued to join or active on a long term basis,” Ms Thompson said.
“What we’re looking to do is to radicalise the intersection of technology and lean services to produce something that’s a completely new model,” she said.
When she thinks of procurement e-sourcing, the things that meet the needs of existing buyers, the things that meet unmet needs, of the new relationships that are being built, “creating new pathways where agencies are telling us what they want, but can’t quite find the means to articulate and ripping up contracting for technology”, she’s reminded of a quote with a philosophical twist.
“I am reminded of something said by William Morris [creation socialist] who said ‘have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’.”
“I know that we’re building something useful and I hope that we’ll build something that’s elegant and perhaps in its own way beautiful, and that I think is the future of government digital marketplaces.”
