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2017•Unpublished venueRequires access

When the Exception Becomes the Norm

Matthias Stuermer, Oliver Krancher, Thomas Myrach

Open publisher page 4 citations

Abstract

Public sector procurement of IT often happens without public tendering because of vendor lock-in, as our ongoing research suggests. We have analyzed 2754 IT procurement projects during the last 7 years on the official Swiss electronic tendering platform. The results indicate that 47.2% of these projects involved contracts above WTO threshold awarded to external IT suppliers without bidding procedure. This is mainly caused by the lack of alternative IT suppliers being able to support existing IT systems. In this paper we introduce a new method for measuring IT vendor lock-in and we present descriptive results including a time series analysis. We find a higher share of direct awards in IT projects than in non-IT projects.

About this research paper

What this paper is about

Public sector procurement of IT often happens without public tendering because of vendor lock-in, as our ongoing research suggests. We have analyzed 2754 IT procurement projects during the last 7 years on the official Swiss electronic tendering platform. The results indicate that 47.2% of these projects involved contracts above WTO threshold awarded to external IT suppliers without bidding procedure. This is mainly caused by the lack of alternative IT suppliers being able to support existing IT systems. In this paper we introduce a new method for measuring IT vendor lock-in and we present descriptive results including a time series analysis. We find a higher share of direct awards in IT projects than in non-IT projects.

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OpenAlex reports 4 citations for this work. Citation counts describe recorded attention and do not establish research quality.

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Available abstract

Public sector procurement of IT often happens without public tendering because of vendor lock-in, as our ongoing research suggests. We have analyzed 2754 IT procurement projects during the last 7 years on the official Swiss electronic tendering platform. The results indicate that 47.2% of these projects involved contracts above WTO threshold awarded to external IT suppliers without bidding procedure. This is mainly caused by the lack of alternative IT suppliers being able to support existing IT systems. In this paper we introduce a new method for measuring IT vendor lock-in and we present descriptive results including a time series analysis. We find a higher share of direct awards in IT projects than in non-IT projects.

Key concepts: Procurement, Vendor, Bidding, Norm (philosophy), Business, Lock (firearm), Public sector, Industrial organization

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