Baltimore County Public Schools, MD implement
transparency solution spotlightonspend to deliver meaningful spend
transparency
Herndon, VA – 15 January 2013 –
Baltimore County Public Schools have deployed Spikes Cavell’s
spotlightonspend
transparency platform to enable citizens in the County and beyond
to better understand where Baltimore County Public Schools spends
taxpayers’ money on the goods and services it needs to run schools
in the County. BCPS’s raw spend data has been classified, enriched
and redacted by Spikes Cavell, and transformed into information
that has both relevance and meaning for the public and businesses
alike. Baltimore’s residents, local small business enterprises and
local media are able to access the transformed spend data through
easy to use spotlightonspend web
application that runs in the Microsoft Azure cloud.
In 2011, the state legislature of Maryland required Baltimore
County Public Schools (BCPS) and other organizations to publicly
post on the internet all of their expenditures over $25,000 for the
2012 financial year by January 1, 2013. Rick Gay, Purchasing
Manager at BCPS said, “As we began to look at what that would
entail it became obvious to me that we could use spotlightonspend
to fulfil the legislative requirement at a greatly reduced cost.
Working with the Spikes Cavell team has been a great experience
and, because of their dedicated efforts and professionalism, we
completed the project 11 days ahead of schedule. Spikes Cavell are
the consummate professionals, they were always reachable and very
proactive to our requests as we developed the information that
would be required to go on to spotlightonspend. One particular
nuance that BCPS was required to do was to annotate all the
minority vendors on the list. The Spikes Cavell team developed a
program change whereby notes indicating this could be added to each
vendor. The site is so impressive that other school systems
throughout the state are looking at implementing their own site as
well using the Spikes Cavell model. This is just one more example
of why the BCPS Office of Purchasing is setting the pace for
everyone else across the country to follow.”
See the case
study for more information on other achievements BCPS made
using Observatory spend data to drive money-saving procurement
initiatives.
http://whatis.spotlightonspend.org/
About Baltimore County Public Schools, MD
From the Chesapeake Bay to the Maryland–Pennsylvania Line,
Baltimore County wraps around but does not include Baltimore City.
With more than 800,000 residents, Baltimore County is diverse with
residents living in suburban, rural, and urban neighborhoods,
reflecting the nation's blend of cultures and backgrounds.
Baltimore County Public Schools is the 26th largest school
system in the US and the 3rd largest in Maryland. It’s $1.5 billion
budget supports the education of more than 105,000 students at 174
schools, programs, and centers in the County.
http://www.bcps.org
About spotlightonspend
spolightonspend is an innovative online platform that seeks to
deliver meaningful visibility of public sector spending on goods
& services. To that end, significant effort is required to
improve the original raw financial data such that it is accessible,
relevant and of value to the general public. The work to effect the
data improvement is undertaken by Spikes Cavell - a private sector
organization that transforms and analyzes spend and related data
for more than 1,000 public sector bodies worldwide to help them
save money, address important policy related questions and as a
bi-product of those efforts deliver transparency.
http://whatis.spotlightonspend.org
TAGS: baltimore county public schools, baltimore county, spotlightonspend, k12 spend, education, Spikes Cavell, public sector, transparency