In Pentagon Contract Fight, Amazon Has Foes in High Places

Re:In Pentagon Contract Fight, Amazon Has Foes in High Places by bilbo0s on Sunday August 04, 2019 @10:39AM (#20606775)

I'm glad you mentioned the caveats with IDIQ contracts. I would say that the IDIQ process rarely, if ever, results in savings. (In fact, if you have some examples where it did I know some people who would be interested in studying those cases.)

The history of IDIQ processes is likely a large part of the reason people were anxious to do something different in this instance. Now that it's all politics, it'll probably cost more and function less when all is said and done.

Some aspects of the military, I don't really miss.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:In Pentagon Contract Fight, Amazon Has Foes in High Places by Spooky23 on Sunday August 04, 2019 @03:43PM (#20608797)

I’ve done IDIQ contracts in state government. You can absolutely save money, but you need to force a limited list of SKUs and renegotiate pricing at different volume-based high water marks.

Winner take all is also important, because it eliminates the room for sales bullshit. The magic is figuring out how to break up the lots of services so that it makes sense. You don’t want to give any one of AWS, Google and Microsoft everything, so you want to design lots that keep it competitive. This also ensures that any one vendor doesn’t subsidize strategic SKUs by discounting something that isn’t meaningful.

Everything fed is more complex, but it’s all doable.

[ Parent | on HN ]