PROJECT RATIONALE

Organizations today use IT to improve the services they provide to their customers, their competitive position, their cost structures, their productivity, and their ability to manage and respond to market conditions. More focus is being placed on the management of IT since IT investments comprise a significant part of the annual expenditure for many organizations.

Most IT managers can articulate their top two or three IT implementation problems. They want to know what specific actions can be taken to show improvements in these areas. Typical examples include:

• Predictability of delivery schedules
• Pricing
• Testing
• Maintenance costs
• Component integration costs
• Delivery and integration of new functionality
• Reliability

There are many different sources of advice on IT procurement available, including:

• Best practice guides (such as Euromethod, SOTIP, and the NCC Procurer’s Guide)
• Methodologies (such as Buy-IT, EURAP, and EC Directives)
• Regulations (such as those explicit practices mandated for public procurements in Europe)

The adoption of these has been very slow, and little has been done to quantify the results.

The typical best practice guide contains so many ideas that it is difficult to work out which ones to adopt and where to begin. (The result may be that no action is taken.) A methodology often involves a customer buying into the whole scheme, which means a significant commitment to adjust established guidelines, procedures, and internal organization.

The VALIDATE project did not set out to create something new, but rather to take all the available information and try to determine what actually makes a difference.

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