Improve Acquisition and Procurement through Data Governance and Information Quality

Abstract

The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (FFATA) required federal contract, grant, loan, and other financial assistance awards of more than $25,000 be displayed on a publicly accessible and searchable website to give the American public access to information on what and how the federal government spends money every year. Federal acquisition databases, such as those maintained by USAspending.gov and fpds.gov, serve this purpose. These databases contain contract information for all US Departments for the last twenty years. However, little has been done to examine the data and extract information that may provide valuable insights on potential ways to improve the efficiency of acquisition management. This report presents a data science approach to assessing and enhancing the quality of the databases and to discovering patterns that can be potentially useful for acquisition research and practice. Two key findings from data analytics include: 1) by utilizing publicly available weather information, we found that some zipcodes have high risks in natural disasters according to historical weather data since 1950, and some projects have a high percentage of contractors located in those high risk areas; 2) by clustering contractors based on their NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) codes, contractors are found to have a unique NAICS code with no other companies in the DoD’s contractor pool capable of performing the same business or providing the same service. These findings provide ways in identifying risk factors in a project so that effective strategies can be designed to mitigate potential risks.