Government and Industry Work Together to Support Data Standardization

In 1999, the Electronic Commerce Code Management Association (ECCMA) was founded as an international not for profit membership association with a mission to research, develop and promote better quality data for use in electronic commerce.

Soon after formation, ECCMA director Peter Benson discovered that the Department of Defense had been doing data standardization work to support military [...]

DOD Getting the Message on Reverse Auctions

As with all of government, the Department of Defense is facing slimmer budgets and looking at ways to save money. Basically as Ashton Carter, Deputy Secretary, Department of Defense, put it: “To do more, without more.”

In December 2010, John Young, a senior fellow at Potomac Institute for Policy Studies and a former U.S. undersecretary of defense [...]

Why Strategic Sourcing Savings Plans Don’t Always Work Out

There has been an ongoing discussion in Linked-In about why some procurement saving initiatives or strategic sourcing plans fail to realize the savings they are projected to have.  The comments to the questions have revealed a few likely reasons so many projects fail.  I work primarily with government agency buying groups, but the following comments pertain [...]

The History of Partnet

I wanted the first blog post of the year to give a little history of Partnet. We are a small business housed on the campus of the University of Utah, in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains. The University of Utah is home to one of the first Computer Science Departments and ranks among the world’s [...]