Andrea Di MaioOn January 7 the Office of Management and Budget issues a memo reminding US federal agencies of the importance of technology neutrality in procurement.
The one-page memo reminds that
[…] policies are built around the use of merit-based requirements development and evaluation processes that promote procurement choices based on performance and value, and free of preconceived preferences based on how the technology is developed, licensed or distributed. In the context of developing requirements and planning acquisitions for software, for example, this means, as a general matter, that agencies should analyze alternatives that include proprietary, open source, and mixed source technologies. This allows the Government to pursue the best strategy to meet its particular needs.
Although there is probably no direct connection, it is difficult not to relate this memo to the recent decision by a federal judge to stop the procurement by the US Interior Department of a Microsoft email solution. It is certainly wise to remind agencies that procurement needs to be open and technology-neutral. Without any reference to the DOI case, there will be cases where technology-neutrality lead to higher costs and changes in risk profiles: in fact vendor lock-in is a risk, but so is a change of architecture or a new licensing model.
Public procurement must be driven by value for money, and while all available options need to be examined, choice must be based on a clear and transparent assessment of benefits, costs and risks.
Category: cloud open source in government Tags: OMB, open source, procurement
2 responses so far ↓
1 Tweets that mention Is the OMB Afraid of Google? -- Topsy.com January 11, 2011 at 7:42 am
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2 Andrea Di Maio January 11, 2011 at 1:21 pm
On Twitter Justin Herman of Phase One Consulting Group observed that this post is analysis free and link-baiting (see http://bit.ly/hR8u9N and http://bit.ly/gcYqLn).
Just for the records, blog posts from Gartner analysts are not meant to be pieces of Gartner research, which is available to our clients. However, in this specific case, I did not suggest any causal link between the federal judge decision and the memo, nor do I believe there is any. I just found the coincidence too interesting not to comment and take the opportunity to say that value for money (taking into account total cost of ownership of course) is what matters.
If Justin had spent some time in Europe, he would be familiar with these sorts of memos from the early open source days.