Managing the Internet Payment Platform Project

This case examines issues in the assessment and adoption of Internet technologies in a federal U.S. government context, and describes in detail a pilot project to determine the feasibility of adopting an ASP solution to support procurement by multiple federal agencies using a variety of different legacy transaction systems. The pilot test of the Internet Payment Platform (IPP) by the eMoney group of the United States Treasury’s Financial Management Service involved three federal agencies and subsets of their suppliers. Participants saw many benefits from their use of the IPP, but agreed that for full-scale operation it needed to be modified to better fit the government procurement context. The project manager is weighing the pros and cons of conducting another pilot test using the same commercial software as before, or obtaining and customizing a new commercial package, or building a new system from scratch.