Hawaii Awards & Notices Data System (HANDS) Wins Government Standard of Excellence Award
The Hawaii Awards & Notices Data System (HANDS) has been nationally recognized as a winner by the Web Marketing Association with a Government Standard of Excellence award. The HANDS system allows users to search for bidding opportunities, contract awards, and Chief Procurement Officer (CPO) requests throughout multiple state and county procurement platforms in a single location.
The judges recognized our efforts by stating: “HANDS succeeds in taking away the pain of posting and finding bidding opportunities, contract awards, and CPO [requests].” The judges also stated that the website’s Application Programming Interface and robust search technology simplifies the procurement process for users.
Historically, over 10,000 users from a variety of businesses seek to do business with the State of Hawaii. But this process was made even more difficult due to the fact that there are multiple websites where the State can post opportunities. In the past, this put a significant burden on businesses due to the amount of time it took to monitor all of these sites and most often they would choose to monitor only one or two – meaning potential missed opportunities. To help combat this, the State of Hawaii would post opportunities on multiple platforms in order to reach more businesses. This process was troublesome for both the State and business owners.
When HANDS was released, it eliminated the pain of posting and finding opportunities. Through the use of an Application Programming Interface (API) HANDS is able to pull in opportunities from all of these multiple websites and display results in a single search. The State no longer needs to post in multiple locations – instead the API allows them to post an opportunity once which then automatically displays in HANDS as well.
HANDS utilizes SOLR, a robust search technology that presents the search in a recognizable way. The user can simply type in a keyword and they will immediately see results matching their entry.
The Hawaii State Procurement Office created HANDS in partnership with Hawaii Information Consortium, the official Internet portal manager of eHawaii.gov.
About the Hawaii State Procurement Office
The goal of the Hawaii State Procurement Office is to promote economy, efficiency, effectiveness, and impartiality in procurement for State and county governments; and efficiency, effectiveness and stewardship in inventory management and surplus property management in an open, fair and transparent process.
About eHawaii.gov
This service was launched as part of the eHawaii State Portal Program. Pursuant to chapter 27G, Hawaii Revised Statutes, the Portal Program is overseen by the Access Hawaii Committee, which collaborates with provider Hawaii Information Consortium (HIC) along with state and county agencies to continually identify new online services to be added to the portal.
About NIC
Founded in 1992, NIC (NASDAQ: EGOV) is the nation’s leading provider of innovative government solutions and secure payment processing, which help make government more accessible to everyone through technology. The family of NIC companies provides digital government solutions for more than 4,500 federal, state, and local agencies in the United States. Forbes has named NIC as one of the “100 Best Small Companies in America” six times, and the company has been included four times on the Barron’s 400 Index. Additional information is available at www.egov.com.