WASHINGTON-The Federal Communications Commission has been nominated for a Computerworld Smithsonian Award for developing and implementing its remote electronic auction system. The annual awards program, first introduced in 1989, has been called “the Academy Awards for information technology,” and the commission could be up against some stiff competition from as many as 100 applicants in the “government and nonprofit organizations” category.
According to the congratulatory letter sent to John Giuli, technical director for the FCC’s auction division, the Computerworld Smithsonian awards program “identifies and honors men and women whose visionary use of information technology produces positive social, economic and educational change. These innovators, nominated by chairmen of the nation’s leading information technology companies, are accorded a permanent place in history at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.”
There are 10 categories of winners, and a three-judge panel of industry leaders votes on each category award individually. Winners’ information is stored at the Smithsonian for future reference, and plaques commemorate the successful nominees.
Mitchell Kertzman, chief executive officer for Sybase Inc., which helped the commission construct its auction system, nominated the agency for one of the awards, whose winners will be honored June 10. The long-form application submitted by the FCC last month described the remote auction system as being capable, after two years, of being able to process “tens of thousands of bids by hundreds of bidders on thousands of licenses” on a 500-user secure wide area network. The system also was characterized as being a benefit to the public in that, through it, auctions replaced lotteries and comparative hearings, thus cutting the time and staff needed to get FCC licenses into the marketplace. Currently, auctions have raised more than $24 billion for the U.S. Treasury, the commission wrote, while promoting competition in various communications services.
Because the automated auction system was not just an off-the-shelf software product, there were obstacles that the FCC had to overcome before it could be offered as an option to remote bidders. Bidders have included economists, industry analysts, gaming theorists, programmers and lawyers, so the system had to be designed to accommodate a number of bidding styles and philosophies. “The technical challenges posed by the design requirements were significant, and great care was given to create a flexible, parameter-driven system powerful enough to adapt to a changing environment,” the FCC submitted.
Originality is one of the criteria on which the Computerworld Smithsonian awards are judged, and the commission defended its invention by stating that, unlike most items sold via an auction, “spectrum licenses are highly interdependent … a combination of these licenses could be worth more to a licensee than the sum of the individual licenses due to factors like market efficiencies of scale or fixed marketing costs.” Because a traditional oral-outcry type of auction would not facilitate this interdependency, the FCC installed its complex database management system to perform simultaneous, multiple-round bidding. According to the questionnaire, “the system was so successful that other U.S. government agencies and foreign governments have expressed interest in using the system to sell licenses and other government assets.” In addition, future releases of the auction system will allow simultaneous auctions of tens of thousands of licenses concurrently, and they will interface with a newly designed collections and licensing system.
