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The Procurement Revolution, by Mark A. Abramson and Roland S. Harris III (Eds.), (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., May 2003, paperback and hardcover, ISBN: 0-7425-3272-0, 472 pages, $27.95 paperback, $70.00 hardcover).
The Procurement Revolution is an edited volume of previously published monographs from the IBM Endowment for the Business of Government. The book is designed to "examine the state of government procurement as we enter the 21st century." The editors believe that the "procurement field has begun to attract a new breed of public servant individuals eager to experiment and develop creative new ways of doing the business of government." The chapters in the book provide numerous case study examples of innovation and experimentation in the federal, state and local governments.
The editors organize the nine chapters around three themes referred to as transformations. The first transformation is the movement from buying goods to buying services. The second transformation is the movement away from "command and control" relationships to those of partnership. The final theme is moving away from paper-based procurement to electronic buying.
Theme One: Transformation from Buying Goods to Services
Four chapters are devoted to this theme. Jacques Gansler writes in "A Vision of The Government as a World-Class Buyer: Major Procurement Issues for the Coming Decade," that government procurement has made significant improvements in the past decade however, much work is yet to be done to meet "desired objectives of efficiency and effectiveness." He believes that the public...