Re: As per usual
The purchasing process was designed to purchase the cheapest possible items when you're buying huge amounts of well-specified commodity physical items. They stick out an RFP with the specs, and buy the cheapest.
It utterly fails at dealing with things that aren't commodities.
A "commodity" is something where there's a market for the things and they're pretty much the same and interchangeable, like sugar or crude oil.
Bespoke software development is about as far from a commodity as you can possibly get. For a start, the idea that there will be good specs at the beginning of such a project is a fantasy - it's impossible to do that as some developer will always find a way to screw up that the specifier hadn't anticipated. The only truly complete spec is a working system.
And since the purchase process is built around the fantasy of specs, it doesn't incorporate trials.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
