As part of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ What Works Cities initiative, the GPL provided pro bono technical assistance to help Indianapolis increase competition, reduce costs, improve service quality, and enhance the City’s information technology (IT) capabilities by adopting results-driven contracting strategies for its IT application services contracts.

The Government Performance Lab is using results-driven contracting strategies to enhance IT capacity in local government. In Indianapolis, the city sought to improve the performance and value for money of its contracted IT application services. To do so, the GPL helped the city create several performance metrics to track the outcomes of IT application services, including timeliness of project work and department satisfaction surveys. The city then designed a competitive procurement approach which enabled them to compare vendor competencies in an actual project setting and accommodate both recurring support and special project needs through a new pricing structure. The GPL also made a number of recommendations to improve contract management and unbundle services from the master IT application services contract. In 2017, Indianapolis negotiated a contract renewal that reduced annual costs by approximately $900,000—nearly $3.6 million total over the remaining life of the contract.