Sniffing Out the Stimulus

If you want to know how the government is spending the stimulus dollars, don’t ask the government. Ask Onvia.

In fact, when, in June, a member of the House of Representatives Oversight Committee rang up Eric Gillespie, senior vice president and chief information officer for Seattle’s Onvia, it wasn’t for the kind of inquisition a Seattle business might worry about. No, what the committee really wanted to know was how it is that one Seattle company has been able to perform a major feat that the government hasn’t: Track the stimulus money.

For those who remember the internet boom, the name Onvia may ring a bell. Founded as a business-to-business firm in 1996, Onvia lost its founders and a lot of revenue during the dot-com bust. Instead of folding, the company restructured. Evaluating the assets that were left, the remaining executives found a small pocket of the business that wasn’t concerned with B2B, but the government market.

It was the most valuable offering the company had, says Gillespie, and it’s what allowed Onvia to emerge from the rubble and grow from a couple of hundred thousand in revenue to $25 million today. Where once Onvia supplied everything from BlackBerrys to sticky notes to small businesses, the company now provides leads for businesses looking to bid on government-funded projects.

Onvia, which sources information from about 89,000 different agencies around the country—from states and cities to mosquito abatement districts and school districts—seems to know about most all of the government’s purchasing plans. And while knowing how the government spends money at the federal level is, Gillespie says, fairly cut and dried, knowing how it spends money at the state and local levels is nearly an intractable problem.

Or was. Through a combination of custom-built technology, deep web searching, a taxonomy that updates every day and manual labor that includes calling procurement officials to capture information, Onvia has found a way to track contracts at every level in every state. If, for example, North Dakota’s Burleigh County Housing Authority is accepting bids for window replacements, Onvia knows about it. And, if the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is looking for engineering and design firms that can renovate approximately 11,000 square feet of a laboratory at the Seattle Division of Veterans Affairs, including the hematology lab, chemistry lab and the anatomic pathology-morgue area of the existing medical laboratory, Onvia

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