Marvin L. Mann Procurement must be radically overhauled to achieve major improvement. Policies which require projects to be broken into pieces and bid result in fragmentation and prevent a total systems view.
Low cost is often a very bad criteria in an IT purchase.
The most successful business IT groups are the ones with the fewest number of vendors. In the past, many government procurement cycles were so long that both the user needs and system solutions proposed by vendors in response to them were obsolete by the time the systems were implemented. The lack of a centralized sales vehicle for state and local government customers is perhaps the greatest challenge agencies face. At the state and local level, areas such as pre-specification requirements and manual systems for bids and proposals are being streamlined to keep pace with changes in information technology. New Activity in the Glass House Table of contents Charles Stevens Simple changes make a big difference.