I have been trying out the General Services Administration’s new portal for Governmentwide Acquisition Contracts, or GWACs.
There is a lot of useful information here, but the user experience remains uneven and in my experience, there are available tools that could improve the ability to analyze the data.
The new GSA web site says:
A Governmentwide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) is a pre-competed, multiple-award, indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract that agencies can use to buy total IT solutions.
The GWAC program has taken their data to the next level by creating an interactive tool that allows GWAC stakeholders to view and segment GWAC information to make better decisions.
Users have the ability to:
- Explore GWAC data by contract family, federal agency, and industry partner
- Build customized reports and download them to your computer
The Users Guide contains the footnote:
The Governmentwide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) Dashboards are intended for informational purposes. The data contained within may not be fully accurate.
The contacts page says:
Request for accessible dashboard content may be directed to herman.lyons@gsa.go.
That may be important to some users, since they, like I experienced, may not be able to download the complete data set. That’s what happened to me, so I contacted the GSA contact, but did not get a response so I downloaded each agency separately and merged them into one spreadsheet 19,168 rows and 18 rows. I also created a data dictionary spreadsheet.
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