“What we want to be is the Match.com between vendors and the government in the coming generation of technological change.” Patrick Munis, CEO of NewWave, offers this with a hint of a smile as he describes his company’s participation with DistilNFO Government Health and the change system- integration companies like his will have to make to be successful in the future.
In conversation with his customers in the federal government, Munis was hearing a common complaint. “They were asking, ‘See the kind of problems I’m facing. Show me the different ways to solve them and educate me about the vendors providing those solutions.’” The traditional government technology acquisition process and the marketplace of ideas government leaders were exposed to was not keeping up with the pace of innovation, Munis kept hearing. “Our goal now,” Munis observes, “is to expose government leaders to other approaches, ideas, tech. We need to be the conduit between our customers and our solution providers.”
This will also require change in the government contractor community as well Munis emphasizes. He hopes for DistilNFO to be part of that change. “Today we have contractors in the middle. We go out there and propose solutions to our customers where we tend to be one-dimensional. The way innovation happens now is not in a traditional RFP-manner,” Munis says, “but in a more open, innovative forum to drive solutions.” Munis points out that the absence of community among vendors often inhibits innovation. Without the catalyst of community and a different “marketplace of ideas,” government rarely gets the best solution he says.
Munis notes that under the rubric of “modernization” and the migration to the cloud that all kinds of companies, thinkers, approaches need to be on the table for government decision makers. He especially points to those small and midsize firms from across the country innovating and who may never have considered public sector work, identifying Databricks and Snowflake as such emergent change agent firms.
“What we have now is a massive transformation to ‘the cloud’ and as a result this allows the government to radically rethink a lot of the things they are doing. Contractors need to do that radical rethinking too. We want to be catalyst for that change in our community.”
Date: November 19, 2018
