When the exception becomes the norm : Direct awards to IT vendors by the Swiss public sector

Public sector procurement of IT often happens without public tendering because of vendor lock-in, as our ongoing research suggests. We have analyzed 2754 IT procurement projects during the last 7 years on the official Swiss electronic tendering platform. The results indicate that 47.2% of these projects involved contracts above WTO threshold awarded to external IT suppliers without bidding procedure. This is mainly caused by the lack of alternative IT suppliers being able to support existing IT systems. In this paper we introduce a new method for measuring IT vendor lock-in and we present descriptive results including a time series analysis. We find a higher share of direct awards in IT projects than in non-IT projects.