Whitehall initiatives make buying easier

Whitehall buying arm the Office of Government Commerce is using eprocurement technologies to make purchasing processes easier and more efficient.

The OGC has taken several steps towards enabling a sophisticated, yet simple, eprocurement infrastructure with the goal of making it easier to do business with the government.

It is working on several initiatives:

• A single platform to share purchasing information between government departments, potentially using open source technology
• The use of XML to establish a common IT purchasing language, allowing the OGC to work with any supplier, regardless of its size or the platform it uses
• The use of online auctions to allow private sector companies to bid more easily for government contracts

• The combination of these initiatives would dramatically alter the processes of doing business with the private sector

The OGC is working with the Business Applications Software Developers Association (Basda) on testing an ebusiness XML communications standard which is expected to take until the end of the year.

'If we can get this right it will absolutely transform the way government does business,' an OGC spokesman told Computing.

The end result will likely be a piece of XML-based software that will sit between suppliers and government departments. When systems are incompatible, a 'translator' will take the data and turn it into a readable language and vice versa.

Meanwhile, online auctions will allow quicker and more efficient processing of tenders with set criteria, as well as reducing costs for suppliers.

However, the OGC has said that the e-auctions will not be suitable for all government contracts.

'There has been some concern about the government's use of online auctions will,' the spokesman said. 'But we won't, for example, use them to advertise a contract for the building of a hospital because there are too many criteria. But if we wanted 20 lorry-loads of bricks, that would be fine, because bricks are bricks.'

It is possible that the purchasing platform to be adopted by the government will use open source technology, which would be a massive boost to the Linux movement, allowing government departments to share purchasing information for the first time.