Managing the it Procurement Process

An IT procurement process, formal or informal, exists in every organization that acquires information technology. As users of information systems increasingly find themselves in roles as customer of multiple technology vendors, this IT procurement process assumes greater management significance. In addition to hardware, operating system software, and telecommunications equipment and services — information resources traditionally acquired in the marketplace — organizations now turn to outside providers for many components of their application systems, application development and integration, and a broad variety of system management services. Yet despite this trend, there has to date been little, if any, research investigating the IT procurement process. While IS development activities are represented by at least 120 keywords in the keyword classification scheme for IS research literature (Barki et al., 1993), marketoriented strategies for information resource acquisition are represented by a single key phrase — ”Outsourcing of IS.”