Among other recommendations, it identified a need to improve project management skills within government. There was a marked absence of any emphasis on procurement skills, which might tackle the problem at its source. Research and benchmarking work that I have been involved in supports the idea that professional qualifications are needed to encourage good practice in the field of IT procurement. Procurement is not just about negotiating the lowest price. It is about acquiring the best solution, using knowledge of the business and IT strategy, market trends, licensing economics, intellectual property rights, application development lifecycles, change procedures, architectures and interoperability.
Procurement is also about the application of commercial skills throughout a project.
IT today is more a matter of procuring relationships than products. And of course relationships resist the degree of precision assumed when specifying commodities for acquisition. Commodities are, of course, ripe for e-procurement solutions. It is fanciful to imagine that a technical specification can be firmly developed in today's IT environment, since each potential solution will have its own associated migration and integration complexities. As the technical architecture being developed becomes more advanced, the interpretation of engineering differences among broadly competing solutions becomes ever more critical.