Socio-Technical Factors in Electronic Software Biddings

Outsourcing of services has been an industry trend for more than two decades. In particular, public software acquisitions have followed this trend. Governments are significant consumers of software and these processes may fail due to different causes such as incomplete requirements elicitation, limited budget, lack of tenderers or even proper tenderers. Moreover, the fact of there being only one qualified tenderer may make the process suspect. The aim of this paper is to identify the variables which influence the result of a software tender process. We present a two-step research: first a quantitative approach and then a qualitative analysis. Initially we formulated the hypothesis that the quality of documents in public software tenders was related to the success of the bidding process. We studied 142 public tenders in Chile, which neither confirmed nor denied any relationship between success and quality of the tender document. In the second step, we applied a focus group and a semi-structured online questionnaire identifying N new potentially factors to success. For them, we found social theories supporting these relationships. The main contribution of this work is to propose a wider set of variables, not merely technical ones, which influence the success of software tender processes.