Washington, D.C. - The Clinton administration next month will try to revive the government's barely breathing electronic commerce strategy.
On the fifth anniversary of the National Performance Review (NPR) - the White House effort to push federal agencies into electronic commerce and improve how services are delivered to citizens - the government is likely to bet on Web-based forms, digital signatures and electronic catalogs as the underpinnings for its new plan.
The feds also are taking pains to listen carefully to state electronic commerce coordinators on issues such as digital signatures, because the federal government shares a large amount of funding and information with the 50 states. And electronic procurement cards (P-card) are expected to play a big role in online purchases.
Despite the best of intentions, the NPR, led by Vice President Al Gore, has failed to deliver on its promises of a unified federal procurement system and secure governmentwide e-mail.
In fact, last December the White House tossed out its earlier electronic commerce policy based on the Federal Acquisition Computer Network (FACNET) and now is scrambling to come up with a new policy by March 3, the NPR's fifth birthday.
FACNET failure
FACNET "was not a successful strategy at all," acknowledged James Bessin, financial systems policy analyst at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). "FACNET was a standards-driven exercise where the government said, If we go with it, everyone else will, too."The business sector is fed up with platitudes about electronic commerce," Bessin added.
A team from the Department of Defense, OMB and other agencies now is reviewing a electronic commerce policy draft slated to replace the ill-fated FACNET initiative.
The General Services Administration last week awarded a mammoth P-card contract to American Express Co., Citibank, First National Bank of Chicago, Mellon Bank Corp., NationsBank and US Bank.
With a potential length of 10 years, the contract could be worth an estimated $100 billion.
"We want to encourage people to use their [P-cards] with electronic catalogs," Bessin said. "And we want to use commercial software packages that are not unique to the government."
New policy
Under the new electronic commerce policy, the Defense Department is expected to be the agency responsible for registering businesses that want to sell to the agencies online.The Defense Department also had this role for FACNET, even though the department did not do a very good job the first time around, Bessin said.
The original White House electronic commerce strategy, which Congress passed as a law called the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994, forced the 46 federal agencies to send all their small-purchase bid information through the electronic data interchange-based FACNET.
About 30 value-added network suppliers tweaked their environments to connect to the FACNET hubs, and the businesses that wanted to electronically submit bids to the government had to subscribe to the VANs.
All of the suppliers were supposed to be using FACNET by 1999.
It was going to be "the single face to industry," a central network pumping out information on everything the government wanted to buy. But then the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), which annually buys $9 billion worth of goods from the commercial world to resell to the defense community, rebelled against FACNET.
The DLA, which was using a different flavor of EDI than FACNET employed, did not want to migrate to FACNET.
Last September, when a Government Accounting Office report on acquisition reform said that 24 senior agency officials found FACNET to be "inappropriate, impractical or inefficient," the administration agreed to kill the FACNET
mandate.
