With the PIP project BuyIT Public, V-ICT-OR aims to develop a dynamic digital purchasing platform that will enable local authorities to initiate and complete their IT purchases swiftly and in accordance with public procurement legislation (equality, competition and transparency). The platform should serve as a digital meeting place between demand (the local authorities) and supply (the market).
The envisaged platform should enable local authorities to make a transparent comparison between various IT products, services and suppliers based on (technical) search criteria. After a choice has been made, both the contract and the payment can be finalised on the platform. For the implementation of this backend process, V-ICT-OR a/o looks at the smart contracting principle based on Blockchain technology.
The solution envisaged by V-ICT-OR is continuously available Software as a Service (SaaS) with, as an application module, an intelligent automatic search function that is supplied with several generic technical specifications, and with a flexibly managed product catalogue (and no 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 aim (and potential added value) of BuyIT Public is to defragment the currently highly fragmented IT procurement landscape within local administrations. This could generate significant economies of scale and efficiency gains for local administrations in their (IT) procurement process.
Also, such a platform could substantially contribute to the (further) digitalisation of the functioning and services of local authorities, so that they can play their societal role even better.
On the other hand, on the market side, the envisaged platform could also contribute to making the public procurement process more transparent, and thus to strengthening competition. An important condition for this is the accessibility of the system, also for the small(er) players on the market.
