Information Technology: Leading Commercial Practices for Outsourcing of Services

摘要

The Department of Defense (DOD) is the federal government's largest consumer ofinformation technology (IT) resources, spending $21.7 billion on IT in fiscal year 2001. For this reason, it is critical that DOD adopt effective IT acquisition practices. Our objective was to identify leading commercial sector practices for acquiring IT services. We were interested in identifying effective practices used across a variety of organization types and structures. We wanted to address the full range of activities, beginning with how organizations make sourcing decisions to managing relationships with selected providers. We focused on practices that were most critical, rather than the full set of practices that could be implemented. In doing so, we asked commercial firms to provide examples of how such critical practices are implemented. Our goal was to use this information to develop an evaluation framework that could provide a basis for comparison and contrast between commercial and federal (DOD and civilian) IT acquisition practices. Our study determined that commercial firms use the term 'outsourcing' to describe activities associated with acquiring IT services.