Chapter 3 - VITA's Supply Chain Management (SCM)

IT sourcing and contract management is focused on business value and source of innovation versus price-based or transactional procurement. Several key initiatives that support SCM's value-focused organization include:

• Managing IT spend through a proactive sourcing strategy.
• Managing the delivery of IT services through category management plans and category owners.
• Developing and managing flexible contracts that form the foundation of the relationship; specifically, creating and managing performance-based contracts.
• Procuring "solutions" to business problems rather than procuring products and/or services with extremely detailed specifications and limited technical requirements.
• Changing acquisition planning perspectives from "single-agency" to "enterprise," "service-oriented," "shared" and "Commonwealth strategic objectives" in order to invite and enable greater value and benefit from the IT market's ever-changing innovation offerings.
• Processes which consistently manage contracts through the life of the contract.
• Provide maximum effectiveness and efficiency for the procurement process, with appropriate controls and compliance.
• Manage suppliers appropriate to their strategic importance.
• Increase the diversity and quality of suppliers providing services.

• Utilizing measurement of internal performance including compliance, process cycle times and costs, material cost savings and spend management. Implement a balanced score card for measuring and tracking the Commonwealth's IT suppliers' service, quality, delivery and pricing.
• Driving analysis based on total cost and ensuring compliance through integration of contract management, transaction management, spend data management and supplier performance management.
• Training IT Sourcing Specialists to be technology savvy consultants empowered with the skill sets needed to be efficient problem-solvers, technology risk mitigators-negotiators and who are able  to translate business needs into efficient and effective IT contracts.
• Being proactive in the industry's shift to Cloud-based solutions and contracts by research, training and developing appropriate procurement documentation.
• Supporting VITA's infrastructure procurements, transition-in and transition-out activities and supplier relationship management.  
• Assessing opportunities to develop future statewide procurements to make more cloud-based offerings available to commonwealth agencies, institutions of higher education and localities.
• Providing formal training to Commonwealth procurement officers and project managers.