One of my favorite Simpsons episodes begins with Homer eating honey-roasted peanuts.  He drops the last one, and as he reaches under the couch to find it, his hand emerges instead with a 20 dollar bill.  His immediate reaction is disappointment: “Twenty dollars?  I wanted a peanut!”  His brain calmly tells him that twenty dollars can buy him more peanuts.  “Explain how!” he demands.  “Money can be exchanged for goods and services,” his brain responds.

The public sector’s ‘D’oh!’

This same, “oh yeah” moment has finally come to the public sector.  Silicon Republic reported yesterday that the Irish public sector is predicting annual savings of €1.7 billion from its new e-procurement plan.  E-procurement is an obvious (and inevitable) option, but certainly not an easy one.  How do you design and implement an online system for the complex process of gettin’?

They started on the right foot, it seems.  They’ve hired a supplier expert, Supplierforce, which has been backed both by Quinlan Private, an equity and real estate investment group, and Enterprise Ireland.  The proposed “complete procurement transformation” remains vague at this point.  Defining one’s procurement process is much like our process for defining a website (and invariably a company) that we’re redeveloping.

Defining procurement versus defining a website

Procurement Process	Web relaunching process (discovery phase)
1. What goods do you want to acquire?	1. What do you want to do with your site (sell, tell, etc)?
2. How will you get those goods?	2. How will you sell or tell with your site (ie who are your users)?
3. How do you evaluate potential suppliers?	3. How is your site designed and written for your users and potential users?

These two processes aren’t exactly parallel, but they are quite close.  Both are really a matter of managing lots of data and as a result, managing a process.

The big question

The question remains for public sector procurement: is this too big?  Have they bitten off more than they can chew?  Is a company with expertise in supplier relationships equipped to embed those supplier relationships into a workable online database?  Amidst all these questions, however, we can rest assured that the public sector has seen the value in looking beyond the peanut.