Communication gaps in a tender process

Abstract

Large IT systems are often acquired in a tender process where the customer states the system requirements, a number of suppliers submit their proposals, and the customer selects one of them. Usually the supplier uses an existing system as the basis for his proposal. He adapts it more or less to the customer’s requirements. This paper is a study of a specific tender process. The customer was a Danish municipality that supplied electrical power, water, gas, garbage collection, etc. for around 100,000 households. The customer wanted a new system for meter inspection, invoicing, planning the meter inspector’s routes, etc. We have studied the requirements, how they were perceived by the suppliers, and how they were intended by the customer. The main findings are that the parties didn’t understand each other, although the suppliers sometimes pretended that they did so. One consequence was that the business goals pursued by the customer were not properly achieved. Among the causes of this were an excessively democratic elicitation process and an inadequate use of requirement techniques, particularly use cases. There were also issues that the existing requirement techniques couldn’t deal with, for instance integration with future systems.