Considerations for moving forward
Our recommendations at the end of the Discovery come from need statements and a comparative analysis. We created a content model to drill deeper into the specific fields and formatting of information for suppliers to use when searching for contract opportunities.
Need statements
We synthesized findings from the diary study into need statements in the voice of businesses to help make decisions and prioritize how to build or improve services. Consider these needs when improving procurement websites for businesses:
- I need to be able to narrow down opportunities to find ones relevant to me.
- I need to know if an opportunity is worth pursuing.
- I need to find the platform on my search engine.
- I need to understand the information.
- I need to pick up where I left off after an interruption.
Fields to display and enable filtering on
We created a content model to drill down into relevant fields to display at different points in the business’s journey when finding a relevant contract, as well as the format the information should take. This model is a starting point, offering a hypothesis to focus prototyping and usability testing with businesses to ensure they meet the need statements.
Comparative analysis
We conducted a comparative analysis to see how different jurisdictions enable businesses to find contract opportunities. We reviewed more than 20 jurisdictions, including several private sector offerings, to inform our analysis. The UK Contracts Finder and Digital Marketplace offer design patterns that we recommend implementing in Canada. This presentation provides more detailed design guidance for improving the experience of businesses looking for public sector opportunities.
Meeting the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) requirements
As well as mandating the existence of the SPA, CETA specifies roughly a dozen data fields that each tender summary on the site must include, as outlined requirements in Article 19.6 of the agreement. Because the specification is expressed in general terms, implementation of the fields necessitates inference and risks misinterpretation.
For anyone faced with the challenge of implementing a data model/schema that complies with CETA, we recommend referencing and using the Open Contracting Data Standard intepreration of the specifications found in Article VII.2 of the revised Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) as a guide; the CETA field specification is a verbatim copy of the one found in the GPA. The OCDS has broad international acceptance and their interpretation of the specification has remained stable for a number of years.
While CETA fields provide a useful starting place for businesses to find opportunities, we hypothesize that meeting CETA compliance is not enough to meet businesses’ needs. Some fields outside of CETA requirements are crucial to supporting basic features for helping businesses find relevant contracts, such as GSIN codes or other methods of identifying the industry. When updating systems to meet CETA, the team recommends further research with businesses on what information they need to make informed decisions on which opportunities are relevant to them.