User Story: As a small business, I need to know which agencies are low on their subcontracting plan targets so that I can grow my business.

[HerschelC]

User Story: As a small business, I need to know which agencies are low on their subcontracting plan targets so that I can grow my business. Producing reports and dashboards that would identify large prime contractors in need of small business support in specific categories would make aid in efforts to grow small business and aid large business in connecting to small business to meet their goals. Ideally, the Subcontract Plan Targets will be added as an element (#139); but even without that data element, companies can easily determine shortfalls and opportunities.

Further, flipping this around, creating information displays that show the first tier small (and other socio-economic category) businesses with expertise in areas or agencies would aid large business in finding capable subcontractors and teaming partners.

Flipping this a third way, this information display would enable contracting officers, OSDBU and SBA PSC's in performing market research to support set aside decisions.

[kaitlin]

Add the story in JIRA: https://federal-spending-transparency.atlassian.net/browse/PUB-78

@HerschelC It seems like the goals (up to 2014) are captured here: https://www.sba.gov/content/small-business-procurement-scorecards-0

Perhaps we could work with SBA to publish these in a machine readable way for ingest into USASpending. I think that these goals are high level and kind of live above the granularity for reported DATA act data.

[HerschelC]

That's a great idea! The small business targets, including subcontracting plan, should be easy to pull in and the basis for a dashboard. These quantitative portions of these reports should be automatically generated from Usaspending. There's no reason to be posting PDFs when Usaspending could have a dashboard built from facts within the data. This should be the single source for measurement based upon data facts - what gets measured, gets done.

But something seems to be off - and whatever it is needs to be explained at the point of information delivery to the information consumer. I picked on USAID since they were listed first on the SBA scorecard website. The pdf scorecard indicates achievement of the Small Disadvantaged Business metric, more than doubling the target, with $184.3M in subcontracting to Small Disadvantaged Business. I went to Usaspending and downloaded the subcontract award data for FY14. I filtered for "disadvantaged" in the subawardee business types and came to a subaward total of $11,972,599.64. The attained goal is more than ten times the amount supported by the data. Why? Is the question that should have an answer at the ready. This is simple "back of napkin" analysis and it's off by orders of magnitude. How can the agency have a number that is vastly different than the number reported to the public? [I'm not asking for an answer, just saying these will be the questions. Queue, data lineage and dictionary conversation.]

Let me touch back on the data element point. There is a more granular level of detail to which I refer in the proposed element. Large businesses must submit a subcontracting plan as part of many procurements - I believe based upon size of the procurement. These plans are actually part of the award evaluation criteria. Many times these subcontract plans are a simple statements to the effect "we will try our best to find 8a/HUBZone/Small, etc. to complete x% of the work". This is part of their proposal. It is this level of granularity that I propose in the new element item 139. This award/contract-level granularity should roll up to the agency level targets. This is also where the user story comes from - helping large businesses to meet their subcontracting goals as submitted.