Digital Marketplace team gets roundtable feedback

The Digital Transformation Agency is planning to make improvements to the Digital Marketplace Beta based on feedback collected through a newly introduced method — roundtable discussions.

During the first round of roundtable discussions, government buyers, vendors and industry leaders were asked what the top priorities for the marketplace should be in the next six months, DTA Content Designer Steven Berends said in a blog post.

Feedback indicates that priorities should lie in opening up the Marketplace to new sellers, creating more opportunities for conversation between buyers and sellers, modernising contracts in line with agile goals, allowing sellers to submit unsolicited new ideas and improving the visibility of deal flow.

Berends said self-service seller onboarding is the Digital Marketplace team’s top priority.

“We want to expand the range of services available in the Digital Marketplace and give all sellers the chance to offer services to government. We will announce the release date for this feature soon,” he said.

Feedback from the roundtable also suggests that sellers feel that a lack of communication can be behind many of the difficulties involved in dealing with government. Examples include a lack of clear, consistent rules across agencies.

Users agreed that the ideal procurement system would allow for good communication, be flexible in terms of contracts and regulation and be collaboratively developed over time.

“We also learned that education is critical. We need to ensure government buyers feel confident using more open and more collaborative approaches. We need sellers to feel confident in sharing ideas and helping solve government problems at an earlier stage. And we need to build this education into every experience in the Marketplace,” Berends said.

“We’ll continue to build and iterate the Digital Marketplace, refreshed by new ideas and richer understanding of the needs of all our users.”

Image courtesy of AJC1 under CC