Micro-Acquisition Pilot

Problem Statement 

Many advancements have been made to modernize IT Procurement at ESDC, such as Capacity on Demand. However, when it comes to coding, development and working in the open, there are still procurement challenges that exist:

• Start-ups and freelancers with the latest technology expertise can face barriers in accessing GC contracts
• Low dollar value contracts go through the same processes as larger, more risky and complex procurements
• Procurement officers face capacity issues particularly now during COVID
• Sharing and reusing of code is not the norm

Objectives

Run a one-year experimental pilot for purchases of $10K or less for custom code that is licensed as open source where:

• Opportunities for micro-acquisitions are widely publicized to suppliers and barriers to entry (such as years of experience, needing to pre-qualify, security clearance) are removed/reduced
• Guardrails are put in place so that teams can complete the micro-acquisitions without needing the support of procurement officers
• All code procured via micro-acquisition is shared on open repositories and made visible to the GC and the public to enable re-use
• IT teams are able to make purchases to address short-term capacity requirements and bring new knowledge into the IT organization
• Payment is made by credit card/PayPal

Expected Results 

• Increased participation and access to developers who wouldn’t normally bid on GC IT contracts
• Increased working in the open by ESDC
• Reduced workload burden on ESDC procurement officers by allowing them to focus on more complex procurements
• Increased ESDC capabilities around agile, including breaking work up into smaller chunks which drive high software delivery and organizational performance
• Increased speed of payment of suppliers

How We Are Minimizing Risk

• This is initiative is being co-sponsored by IITB and CFOB
• We aren’t changing any procurement or finance rules. Existing safeguards such as section 32 and 34 approval remain in place.
• We are working with our CFOB partners to put in place:
  • guardrails to protect against contract splitting
  • a short legal document to address Intellectual Property rights for purchases made via the Micro-Acquisition pilot
• We are working with colleagues in IITB to establish and document procedures to verify the quality of the code that is purchased via Micro-Acquisition (including the automation of testing using OSS tools/CLI).
• We are developing and testing the draft Micro-Acquisition process with our stakeholders (CFOB procurement, CFOB acquisition card team, IITB finance team and the Office of Small and Medium Enterprise at PSPC)
• We are taking lessons learned from others who have done similar micro-procurement initiatives (the BC Developers Exchange/BC Digital Marketplace, US government, Industry, the GCDevelopers Exchange)
• We will be requiring that all code that is purchased via micro-acquisition is documented on the Open Resource Exchange so that it is findable and to facilitate code re-use.

Additional Materials 

• Presentation
• Business case
• Blog post “Micro-Acquisition Pilot: Status Update 1”
• Blog post “Better tech through micro-procurement” Part one and Part two
• Close-out Report
• Blog post “Closing out the Micro-acquisition pilot”