It’s never been more convenient to buy stuff than it is in 2015. When you need a new set of shower speakers, you probably will have them delivered directly to your home from Amazon. If you’re like me, you’ll read feature descriptions and user reviews to make sure you’re choosing the right model. The web has given us convenient access to a wealth of information on whatever we’re looking to spend money on.
It wasn’t always like this. Up until e-commerce went mainstream, if you decided to get those shower speakers, you had to leave your home on a Saturday and drive to a mall with a Best Buy or Radio Shack. After finding parking and walking across a baking asphalt lot, you had to find the section of the store with shower speakers and get the attention of the right salesperson, who you then had to rely on to give you information on pricing, quality, and features. Unless you knew somebody who owned the exact model you were looking at, you had no point of reference beyond what the salesperson told you.
But today, you can skip the hassle and spend all that time doing chores or watching sports or whatever you do on weekends. And with more complete information on the range of products available, you are more likely to buy what you actually want. Isn’t it great that the Internet is here to aid the process of buying stuff?
Apparently not if you are buying technology for the government.
I’m a salesperson at a technology company, and I’m trying to sell to a government right now. Literally every piece of information about our company and products, from security and technical documentation to detailed pricing and volume discount breakdowns, is publicly available on our website. Yet I’ve spent the better part of my week watching my number of unread emails spiral out of control (even for me) while I rush to write all of this information down in essay format. Then I have to get our lawyers to read and sign it. Then I have to make two hard copies and physically mail them across the country. This is literally the only way that this government is legally permitted to acquire information about our company to help their buying decision.
Regulation of how governments spend taxpayer money is critical to limiting corruption, so we should preserve aspects of procurement policies that ensure unbiased evaluation of options. But when the laws that dictate purchasing processes were made, the website — that great invention that allows you to make information available for people to find at their discretion without having to physically tell it to them — didn’t exist. There was no way to make information publicly available short of posting a giant billboard over your store or office.
Now we have websites that can help governments make informed decisions. And laws that stifle informed decision-making present a risk to taxpayers, too.
In October of 2013, only seven people nationwide were able to enroll in health insurance plans through Healthcare.gov. Not long after, it came out that the contractor chosen by the Department of Health and Human Services to build it had failed, among other things, to load test the solution before launching it. This was just the most conspicuous instance of a pervasive problem. In a recent interview with Fast Company, President Obama admitted that across government, “technology has been terrible."
The president also said that changing this state of affairs can be “transformative,” not only in improving government services, but “in changing people’s attitudes’ about government.” And I’ve argued before that technology can be the path by which government regains the people’s trust.
Maybe we could start by allowing government purchasers, like consumers, to do their own research on websites so that they can discover all the relevant information, not just what a bidder chooses to show them.
It would certainly make my life easier.