For 60 years, Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) has been a partner with GSA, so intertwined that D&B requirements are identified in the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR).  D&B has been maintaining procurement data that tie back to GSA’s Integrated Award Environment (IAE).  Recently D&B and GSA renegotiated their contract terms to align with the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act), which makes Federal data more transparent. GSA will now retain all procurement information and the D&B references in the FAR are being removed.

Federal ownership of the data brings transparency requirements, so D&B and GSA have agreed to make key procurement information available for commercial use.

GSA states on its website that the key contractual changes include:

• Expanded Use by Federal Government eliminates barriers for use within government for D&B-sourced data distributed by the IAE, opening up data use to any federal agency for their business analysis purposes
• Perpetual Retention eliminates the current requirement to remove D&B-sourced content from government systems if another party takes over D&B’s support role, eliminating a potentially enormous costly and burdensome transitional challenge
• Commercial Re-use allows third-parties to access and use a subset of D&B data for commercial use

We have anticipated the first two changes for some time, especially being spurred on by the institution of the Federal Strategic Sourcing Initiatives, Price Point Tool, and the Transactional Data Reporting requirement.

Commercial Re-use is more interesting as the language vaguely defines allowable accessible data, with it currently remaining unclear what data will be available to third parties and how to access it.