Re: Bureaucratic procurement
"Who are the sellers and who pre-approves them? "
Doesn't really matter, the suppliers are all resellers, and the business model is the same for all of them: Quote for all the core and clearly specified elements of a tender at lower margin than you need/want, in order to win the contract, then make the overall margin by inflating the prices for everything that the customer didn't specify in black and white. That can be fomalised as a ludicrous "non standard request" charge, where the request itself is the profit-earner rather than the actual item, it could be a "variation to contract", or it can just be an extortionate price for the item concerned. And where cr@p-headed procurement and finance procedures mandate the use of approved suppliers, they prevent people using common sense when the organisation is being fleeced.
I work in the private sector, for a very large company who has agreements with a huge telecoms provider and a US based ITO. Both are rapacious b@stards who charge the earth for every one of the multitude of things that our procurement and in-house IT didn't specify at the time, so the NHS may be doing poorly, but its not alone.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
