The IT acquisition process extends from the initial determination of needs to the final implementation of the acquired product. This report addresses three IT acquisition stages—presolicitation, solicitation, and source selection. During the presolicitation phase, contracting personnel develop specifications, prepare the acquisition plan, and apply for and receive a delegation of procurement authority (DPA). In the solicitation phase, agencies prepare and release the solicitation, respond to vendor questions, and close the solicitation. During source selection, agencies evaluate the proposals, may negotiate with vendors, call for best and final offers, and award the contract. Several laws and regulations, including the Brooks Act and the Warner Amendment, the Competition in Contracting Act (CICA), the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act, the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), and the Federal Information Resources Management Regulation (FIRMR), govern these three phases. The Brooks Act, 40 U.S.C. 759, gives GSA exclusive authority to procure IT and the power to delegate this authority by issuing a DPA to other federal agencies. GSA has given agencies a blanket delegation, usually $2.5 million, below which they can procure IT resources without requesting a specific DPA from GSA. GSA will raise or lower this blanket authority based on an agency’s history of acquiring IT. For any acquisition above the blanket delegation, agencies must obtain a DPA by submitting an agency procurement request (APR) to GSA. The Warner Amendment, 40 U.S.C. Section 759(a)(3)(C), exempts certain Defense IT procurements from the Brooks Act, and thus from the requirement to obtain procurement authority from GSA. These exempted procurements include those that support mission-critical, command and control, and intelligence activities. CICA, Public Law 98-369, establishes a policy of full and open competition for all federal procurements. The act requires that contracts with limited competition be formally justified. Such contracts are often awarded as sole source, compatibility limited, or limited to specific make and model. CICA also sets forth mechanisms for vendors to protest the government’s procurement actions. Through CICA, protests may be made to the agency, GSA’s Board of Contract Appeals (GSBCA) for IT resources, the General Accounting Office (GAO), the U.S. District Courts, or the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Questions or objections having to do with certain small business or labor matters are reviewed by the Small Business Administration or the Department of Labor. The Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act, Public Law 103-355, was passed in 1994 to streamline the way the government buys goods and services, including IT. Among its provisions, the act authorized the simplified acquisition threshold at $100,000, established pilot programs to test alternative and innovative procurement techniques, promoted electronic commerce, encouraged the use of off-the-shelf purchases, and required contracting personnel to conduct more extensive debriefings to losing offerors. The executive branch is currently developing regulations to implement the act. The FAR is the body of procurement regulations that all executive agencies must follow when acquiring different types of supplies and services, including IT. The FIRMR, used in conjunction with the FAR, applies specifically to the acquisition, management, and use of IT resources. The following questions and answers provide information on the average time taken to complete the various steps in the IT acquisition process, as well as on other related factors. The average time to award IT contracts increases as the size of the contract increases. In our sample of four dollar thresholds, contract award time frames ranged from 158 to 669 days, as shown in figure 1 below. Contracts under $250,000 generally went through five basic steps: purchase requisition, presolicitation notice, release of the solicitation, closing of the solicitation, and contract award. For those between $250,000 and $25 million, one or two additional steps—the acquisition plan and best and final offer—were sometimes added. Those that were $25 million and above generally had the first five steps plus four additional steps: the APR, DPA, acquisition plan, and best and final offer. No one step consistently took the most time. The acquisition steps that took the longest also varied by dollar strata. Specifically, contracts from $25,000 to $250,000 and $2.5 million to $25 million took the longest average time from the presolicitation notice to the release of the solicitation (57 days (36 percent) and 98 days (29 percent), respectively). Procurements of $25 million and above took comparatively more time from the solicitation closing to receipt of the best and final offers (186 days or 28 percent). This latter period would generally include the time required to evaluate proposals and conduct discussions in these more complex procurements. Figure 2 provides details on the average time taken in awarding IT contracts for the four dollar strata. As noted earlier, CICA establishes a policy of full and open competition for all procurements unless an exception is specifically justified. In our sample, the two most common types of procurements were (1) sole source and (2) full and open competition. These two types made up 81 percent of the total number of contracts awarded and accounted for 83 percent of the total value of contracts in our sample. Sole source contracts from $25,000 to $250,000 averaged 150 days to award, while such contracts of $25 million and more took an average of 295 days. Fully competitive contracts in the lowest dollar strata averaged 184 days, and it took an average of 708 days to award them in the highest dollar strata. Figure 3 lists the time frames for both types of contracts by dollar strata. No. The smallest dollar strata had the largest number of contracts and the highest strata contained the most contract dollars. Table 1 shows the number of contracts and total dollars across each of the four dollar strata. Hardware, software, maintenance, and support services are the major types of IT resources being acquired. Although the four types of resources were acquired in about the same amount of time—5 and 8 months respectively for the two lowest dollar strata—some differences occurred at the two highest dollar strata. As shown in figure 4 below, contracts from $2.5 million to $25 million, where software was the primary purchase, took 579 days compared to about 357 and 375 days, respectively, for contracts that were primarily hardware and maintenance, and 284 days for support services. For contracts $25 million and over, hardware took an average of 780 days compared to about 565 days for both software and support services, and 338 days for maintenance. Protested contracts took longer to award than nonprotested contracts in every dollar strata. The increased time was most significant in the lowest and highest dollar strata. Protested contracts from $25,000 to $250,000 took, on average, 50 days longer (31 percent) than nonprotested contracts, and protested contracts of $25 million and more took, on average, 222 days longer (41 percent) than nonprotested contracts. Protested contracts took longer to award for a variety of reasons. In addition to the time taken to resolve the protests, other factors, such as competition type and evaluation method, can also increase the contract award time. As shown in figures 3 and 7, full and open contracts take longer to award than sole source contracts and best value contracts take longer to award than lowest cost contracts. Of the protested contracts that were $25 million and more, 85 percent were full and open and none were sole source. Also, almost 70 percent of those protested contracts used the best value evaluation method. Furthermore, large dollar contracts are much more likely to be protested. For example, while 44 percent of contracts $25 million and more were protested, only 3 percent of the small dollar contracts were protested. Figure 5 shows the differences in days to award protested and nonprotested contracts. Contracting officers issue amendments to add, change, or clarify some aspect of the contract solicitation including the requirements, evaluation criteria, or closing date. For all dollar strata, contracts that had amended solicitations took longer to award than contracts without amended solicitations—ranging from an average of 45 days longer at the smallest dollar strata to 406 days longer at the largest dollar strata. Figure 6 shows the average days to award contracts with amended and unamended solicitations for each dollar strata. Lowest cost contracts are awarded to the offeror with the lowest-priced technically acceptable proposal. In best value contracts, the government may consider other factors, such as technical merit, along with cost in making the award. The time to award both lowest cost and best value contracts increased with the size of the dollar strata. Lowest cost contracts from $25,000 to $250,000 averaged 173 days to award, and such contracts $25 million and more took an average of 567 days. Best value contracts from $25,000 to $250,000 averaged 226 days compared to 777 days for contracts that were $25 million and more. Figure 7 shows how long it takes to award both types of contracts in each of the four dollar strata. The average time to receive a DPA increased as the amount of the contract increased. It took agencies about 30 to 40 days to receive DPAs for contracts under $2.5 million and 60 to 90 days for contracts $2.5 million and more. We calculated the time to receive a DPA from the day the agency’s contracting office approves the APR to the day GSA issues the DPA. (For some agencies, this period includes the time to send the APR from the bureau through the department level before sending it to GSA. We included this period because the contracting office must wait for GSA approval before proceeding with the contract.) GSA calculates the time to issue a DPA from the time it determines that an agency’s APR is acceptable for review until it issues the DPA.