Experiences from a Tender Process

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 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, but often pretended so. One consequence was that the business goals pursued by the customer were not properly achieved. Among the causes of this were an excessive democratic elicitation process and an inadequate use of requirements techniques, particularly use