FAPIIS

I read an article today over at Government Executive to Expand a Contractor Performance Database. This is generally a good idea but I think there is a problem with the trajectory based on the article. There was a phrase in the article, "culls contractor data from a number of disparate databases and government records."

The problem here is the data. I have seen some of the data from databases that will be culled. The data quality is wildly inconsistent. This type of service can only be effective if the data reported is of consistently high quality. So the first phase of this project must focus on defining quality data, identifying low quality data and cleaning it up. You can take data from PPIRS and CPS, but if the data quality is bad, then deriving something useful from it is very unlikely.

There is no question that a system can be built that will pull this data together to provide people visibility into contractor performance. But that visibility will likely not be an accurate depiction of the real contractor performance until rules concerning data quality are established and enforced. Try it for yourself. Try to look in these systems for a company that you know to be good and one that you know to be bad. Compare what you find in the systems. I performed this exercise and found that the bad company actually looked pretty good and the good one looked pretty good too. Is that fair? The point of these systems is to differentiate one contractor from another. If everyone still smells rosy then we are missing the point.