1. ¹Department of Information and Process Management, Bentley College, Waltham, MA, USA
2. ²Department of Accountancy, Bentley College, Waltham, MA, USA

Correspondence: JL Gogan, Department of Information and Process Management, 175 Forest Street, Waltham, MA 02452-4705, USA. Tel: +1 781 891 2098; Fax: +1 781 891 2949; E-mail: jgogan@bentley.edu

Abstract

This case examines issues in the assessment and adoption of Internet technologies in a federal US government context, and describes in detail a pilot project to determine the feasibility of adopting an application service provider solution to support procurement by multiple federal agencies using a variety of different legacy transaction systems. The pilot test of the Internet Payment Platform (IPP) by the eMoney group of the United States Treasury's Financial Management Service involved three federal agencies and subsets of their suppliers. Participants saw many benefits from their use of the IPP, but agreed that for full-scale operation it needed to be modified to better fit the government procurement context. The project manager is weighing the pros and cons of conducting another pilot test using the same commercial software as before, or obtaining and customizing a new commercial package, or building a new system from scratch.