The Dotted Line

 

Government agencies award a large number of contracts in a variety of fields and hence spend a lot of time defining, monitoring and managing these contracts. So it should not come as a surprise that a majority of these agencies have a formal contract management system. Most commercial firms, on the other hand, do not have such a formal system.

However, the commercial firms should not just ignore the need for a contract management system. The current trend in business operations including information technology is toward specialization. More and more companies are focusing their resources on core activities and having other vendors perform non-core activities. This means that the number of contracts in the commercial sector is increasing. Even though the commercial contracts are generally smaller in size than the government contracts, the complexity of managing them is increasing--if not because of the size then because of the number of contracts. Thus the need for a formal process and system to award, manage and monitor contracts is increasing.

Why Would You Need It?
As the size and complexity of IT projects are increasing more and more vendors are getting involved. Many projects have multiple vendors working under a variety of contracts. Hence managing these contracts for compliance and to ensure accountability and quality has become critical for the success of an IT …

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