Thread Subject: Re: Draft Questions

From: terry.weaver@gsa.gov
Date: Thu, Dec 14 2006 12:10 PM

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Diane Golden said
>Quote> "Here's my stab at the questions that would/could be asked to try
to
determine if a set of "mandatory" access standards could be identified (in
other words ones which must be met by a product before it could be
purchased
rather than all being part of a "best meets" review process that includes
other factors such as cost and business need.)"<end quote<

>>TW>> Business need is the justification agencies have to make any
purchase - if we can't connect an acquisition to a bona fide business
requirement, we have no business purchasing anything. Federal procurement
requirements contain many "over-arching" requirements - Energy Star, Buy
Green, Buy American, etc... The challenge facing acquisition officials is
how to blend all of these "must do's" with business need.

Here is an example from a call I received early on; a Federal agency with
millions of lines of a proprietary assembly language code running on a
large complex of mainframe computers and storage devices needed to acquire
job control and scheduling software. The estimated cost of the contract
was several hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If the agency had to acquire the most accessible software job control and
scheduling software, it would require that they re-engineer the assembly
language code - costing in the hundreds of millions dollars and having a
huge schedule impact. Because they had a business need for software that
was compatible with their installed legacy system as well as a business
need for providing accessibility (i.e. Section 508), the solution was to
include 508 requirements that their market research showed was available
for their proprietary code and to ensure that there was a reasonable
accommodation ready for those 508 provisions that weren't met. If the
software the agency wanted to purchase had to meet a set of mandatory
access standards, the ultimate solution for them would have most likely to
have gotten themselves completely exempted from any 508 compliance by
rightfully calling the requirement an undue burden.<<end quote<<


>DG>"1) Can conformance to the standard be judged as yes/no OR is the
standard
one for which conformance will be identified along a continuum of 100%
conformance to lesser levels (85%, 70% . . . )?",end quote<

>>TW>> But, if the scale is at the provision level, it still requires a
sophisticated buyer to interpret and apply to a given acquisition. Are
the conformance levels self-asserted? If not, are we creating a new, huge
enterprise for testing and labelling? >>end quote>>

>DG>"2) For a standard with yes/no conformance - are there sufficient
products
on the market so that other factors (cost and business need/functional
performance) can be used in a competitive procurement (e.g. there are a
sufficient number of products that meet the access standard so that there
would still be a competitive procurement.)"

>>TW>> Who would be doing this kind of advanced market research? It
would require a substantial team of knowledgeable IT/AT/508 experts to
research and possibly test the spectrum of EIT products that 508
covers.<<TW<<

"It would seem that for a standard to be mandatory, the conformance would
need to be able to be judged yes/no (meets or does not meet) and there
would
need to be sufficient products on the market so that the procurement would
still be competitive when only considering products that meet the
mandatory
standard(s)."
>End quote>

>>TW>> I think we are on unstable ground in an effort that appears to be
an attempt to guide procurement officials in purchase decisions
arbitrarily by removing their discretion to establish the agency's total
business need. To add another level of complexity - what if the most
accessible product (or the one that meets the Standard for the most
mandatory provisions) does not meet Energy Star or one of the other must
do's? These are decisions best left to the agencies' own business
experts. My two cents <<end quote<<

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