Suggesting SaaS Procurement within a Swiss Public Company

Resources and know-how in IT departments of organizations are limited and Software as a Service (SaaS) provides a solution for overcoming bottlenecks and offers opportunities (e.g. no or only low up-front investments, service scalability regarding user numbers, and easy access over the internet). Employees in charge of public procurement in a project must consider technical (standards such as ISO/IEC 27001/27002), legal (procurement law and data protection regulations), and procedural aspects (Hermes 5.1), which make it challenging to provide eligible SaaS solutions.In this study, the Design Science Research (DSR) approach will be applied as a research strategy. In the awareness phase, the problem and thesis statement as well as an extensive literature research about the relevant framework components and the research methodology are discussed. In the subsequent suggestion phase, the derived knowledge of the literature review was used to extract features, requirements, options and project parameters which were allocated to market analysis and procurement process steps. In this phase, ITIL was used to define the role of IT in procurement and the elements of the St. Gallen Management Model were used to weigh the aforementioned aspects. Thereafter, in the development phase, a preliminary framework version was developed, which was then evaluated by expert reviews of specialists in project management, technology, public purchasing and law in the evaluation phase. Their feedback of the review led to change requests or supplements which trigger iterations in the suggestion and development phases to ensure the applicability of the final evaluated framework. In the conclusion phase, results were discussed, and the contribution of the work was highlighted as well as delimitations were made, which identify area for future research work....