Improving Services Acquisition Tradecraft: Services Acquisition Is Not for Amateurs
Abstract
The Department of Defense is one of the largest buyers of materials, goods, and services in the world. A majority of this effort is contracted out vice performed in house, including many types of services. In a trend that began in the early '90s, the amount of funds spent on services has grown at an accelerated rate as the U.S. military transformed itself a personnel/hardware-based force to an information-based force. In 2010, DoD purchased just over $200 billion in services from a total budget of more than $530 billion. If these purchases were concentrated as a single business unit, the "DoD services unit" would rank as the third largest U.S. business, between ExxonMobil and Chevron, respectively. This entity is run by a collection of government employees stationed around the globe each trying to provide the warfighter with mission critical items. The challenge Carter issued to this distributed workforce is to increase our process efficiency so that funds can be reallocated to direct warfighter support and equipment modernization. His guidance is a call to action on improving business practices. One of the first challenges facing the services acquisition professionals in optimizing their processes is consolidating service activities into like categories. To assist this effort, Shay Assad, director, Defense Procurement and Acquisition Policy (DPAP), provided a definitive framework for DoD services in his memorandum on the taxonomy for the acquisition of services, Nov. 23, 2010. This framework grouped 33 activities into six large groups, providing the needed clarity for improving how each of these categories is acquired. Of the six groupings, three categories account for 74 percent of the total service acquisition budget. These three categories are Knowledge-Based, Facility-Related, and Equipment-Related Services. The remaining categories range from less than 1 to 10 percent of the total. We'll narrow our focus to these "Big 3" groups.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 01, 2011
- Accession Number
- ADA564399
Entities
People
- John Mueller
- Peter Czech
Organizations
- Defense Acquisition University