Los Angeles County Uses Master Agreement to Streamline IT Purchasing in HR Efforts

Los Angeles County has begun using an enterprise services master agreement (ESMA) to help minimize procurement timelines from 18 months to three months.

One of the county's latest projects includes the county's human resources department. The discussion centers around a SharePoint collaborative automation.

The county's new data center migration was also solicited through ESMA.

In the past, the county qualified multiple vendors into a pool, then released a statement of work to be issued to those contractors.

The new ESMA is based on those previous agreements with specific vendors, which “established a paradigm for those terms and conditions and the work order process that we set up for those programs,” said James Hall, the strategic sourcing officer for the county internal services department. This includes the SharePoint online system that manages work orders and solicitation.

Jeramy Gray, the county’s assistant executive officer for technology and planning to the Board of Supervisors, told Techwire in an interview that the expectation is that IT has a more efficient way of handling procurement and that this program should meet that expectation.

“The feedback from the IT community and we hope from the vendor community is that this is a breath of fresh air. It streamlines a lot of the T’s and C’s [terms and conditions] and bureaucratic nuances and shifts them up front, so it allows the county to accelerate the engagement therefore accelerating our deployment,” Gray said.

The new agreement includes approaching department needs from multiple angles.

“We try to look at it both from the department’s perspective and from the contractor’s perspective,” Hall said.

The agreement includes:

• Online assessments for department readiness
• RFPs or work orders
• Surveys of vendors who would be interested in participating

“For me the real secret sauce to the success of our enterprise services master agreement is having staff that reaches out to departments and spends time with them and pulls out of them information and gets it down into something that we can send out to a contractor,” Hall said.

The ESMA program took 12 months to create, get board approval and meet county counsel legal regulations.

It will save money on upfront costs but also internally in soft costs like time and labor for internal employees.

“If it’s one message we want to send to the vendor community, this is something they should sign up for if they want to do business with the county. It is a primary resource for the IT community in the county,” Gray said.