March 18, 2004
An Incentive for Drafting RFP's Full of Holes?
Back in 2000 the Department of the Navy awarded EDS a nearly-$7-billion, 7-year contract to provide all the Navy's IT data, voice, and video services, plus all desktop and laptop PC's, for 400,000 or so Navy and Marine Corps members.
Now, I defer to no one as a fan of "privatization" on general principles, but this has evidently been a disaster for both the Navy and EDS. Some of the problems are attributable to the peculiar delights of government contracting—for example, that the roughly 40% of the work previously done by minority-, women-owned, and otherwise protected subcontractors could not be diminished regardless of productivity gains—but according to this account, the root problem is the toxic mixture generated by the collision between a sloppy RFP and the sales culture of IT service providers.
The "winner's curse" in yet an other incarnation.
Posted by Bruce at March 18, 2004 3:44 PM | TrackBackPosted to Finance | IT Printer-friendly version
Posted by: Malcolm Ryder at March 30, 2004 9:44 AM
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