Procurement Strategies for Information Systems
提出一个采购策略框架，帮助管理者根据系统设计的具体性和需求不确定性，选择内部开发、外包或采购软件包等不同方式，并用芬兰公司数据进行了检验。
:A general framework of different procurement strategies is introduced to help managers review their project portfolio to find more effective ways of using both internal and market resources in information systems development. Major decision criteria—the specificity of system design and the uncertainty involved in requirements specification—are adopted from transaction cost economics to determine what procurement strategies should be used in different situations. According to our Procurement Principle, systems that are company-specific and involve high uncertainty have to be internally developed because they require both the specific knowledge and intensive interaction between developers and users. More standard requirements indicate the use of outside consultants or software contractors who have experience and knowledge about a similar type of systems. For routine systems common in many organizations, acquisition and tailoring of a software package provides the most efficient procurement strategy. The Procurement Principle is also empirically tested with data from recent system development projects in major Finnish companies. Partial support was gained for the framework, but some interesting deviations were also detected, such as a tendency to rely on in-house development of even routine systems.