News on 13 September 2000
Over 150 people attended the recent Bidders' Conference
for a new local authority e-commerce initiative, the <idea>marketplace
(see News story).
The project is the brainchild of the Improvement and Development Agency
for local government (IDeA) which plans to create a web-based system to
manage ordering and payments, expected to save around 15% on the combined
purchase and transaction costs of local government procurement.
Although all local authorities were informed of the project, they were
specifically not invited to the conference. The wide range of organisations
attending included ICL, Oracle, BT, Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclaycard
Cap Gemini, KPMG, PriceWaterhouse Coopers and Andersen Consulting as well
as a host of consultants and software houses.
The successful bidder will contract with the Local Government Information
House, a subsidiary of IdeA, and is expected to contribute an up-front
payment of £350,000 towards the estimated £450,000 set-up
costs of the project.
A spokesman for IdeA said that by the deadline they were looking for something
between an expression of interest and a fully-fledged proposal: "It
is unlikely that a single organisation could do the job and we are looking
to build on existing best practice. We expect to provide a broader marketplace
than one driven solely by price."
Some criticism was expressed at the conference about the short time-scale,
which made it difficult for bidders to talk to all their potential consortium
partners. In response to this the original deadline for proposals of 27th
September has been extended, but only until the16th October.
