Challenge
With the PIO project BuyIT Public, V-ICT-OR aims to develop a dynamic digital purchasing platform that should allow local administrations, in accordance with public procurement legislation (equality, competition and transparency), to launch and finalise their IT purchases in a rapid manner. The platform should act as a digital meeting place between demand (local governments) and supply (the market).
The intention is that local governments can make a transparent comparison between different IT products, services and suppliers on the platform based on (technical) search criteria. After making their choice, the contract and payment can be completed on the platform. For the implementation of this back-end process, the PIO project is looking at, among other things, the smart contracting principle based on Blockchain technology.
The solution envisaged by V-ICT-OR is continuously available Software as a Service (SaaS) with an intelligent automatic search function fed by a number of generic technical specifications as the request module, and with a flexibly managed product catalogue, i.e. not a static or limitative product list.
The latter implies that interested suppliers should be able to add their products to the BuyIT Public catalogue or provide an interface to their own catalogue.
The intent (and potential added value) of BuyIT Public is to defragment the currently highly fragmented IT procurement landscape within local governments, which can generate significant economies of scale and efficiency gains for local governments in their (IT) procurement process.
Also, such a platform can substantially contribute to the (further) digitalisation of local governments' operations and services, allowing them to (even) better fulfil their societal role.
On the other hand, towards the market, the envisaged platform can also contribute to making the public procurement process more transparent and thus to strengthening competition. An important condition here is the accessibility of the system, also for the small(er) players in the market.
