Public Sector
What Is TIPS Cooperative Purchasing and How Does It Work?
A technology director works out in March that the network needs replacing before students return in August. The work is specialized, the district does not employ anyone who has done it at this scale, and the obvious answ...
How to Purchase IT Services Through a TIPS Contract
Most of the difficulty in buying professional services through a cooperative contract has nothing to do with the contract. The contract settles one question, which is whether a competitive procurement has already been ca...
TIPS IT Consulting Services: A Guide for Public Agencies
Public agencies buy IT consulting for reasons that have very little to do with a shortage of technical ability. Agency technology teams are frequently excellent. What they lack is a second person who has done this partic...
How School Districts Can Purchase IT Services Through TIPS
A school district runs an enterprise technology estate on a budget and a headcount that would embarrass a mid-sized company. Wireless in every classroom, thousands of devices in the hands of people who did not choose the...
What to Look For in TIPS 230601 IT Consulting
An award tells you that a procurement happened. It does not tell you that the supplier who holds it is right for your project. Contract 230601 covers a broad range of work, several awarded vendors can quote the same requ...
TIPS 230601 IT Consulting Security and Risk
Procurement for IT consulting usually ends with a price and a scope. Neither describes what actually changes on the first day of work: somebody who does not work for you now holds a login, and possibly a badge, a network...
What You Own at the End of a TIPS 230601 Engagement
A purchase order under this contract buys hours at a published ceiling. That is what the award settles, and it is very nearly all the award settles.
It is usually not what the buyer wanted. What a public organization wan...
Measuring the Value of TIPS 230601 IT Consulting
Twelve months after an engagement ends, somebody who did not authorize it will ask what it achieved. Often that person is new, or is in finance, or is preparing a budget request and needs to know whether the last one wor...
Accessibility Obligations in a TIPS 230601 Purchase
Most compliance questions in a technology purchase arrive through the funding: accept federal money and conditions follow it. Accessibility is not one of those. It attaches to a state or local government entity because o...
Cooperative Contract vs. Your Own RFP
A business office reaches this question in a fairly specific way. Someone has scoped a piece of technology work, found that an awarded cooperative contract appears to cover it, and now has to decide whether to buy throug...