Buying American in IT Procurement

Service or product? As cloud services gain in popularity, technology and procurement managers need to navigate the murky waters of regulations governing the purchase of those services. In May 2011, the General Services Administration (GSA) did something it does all the time—it issued a request for quotations (RFQ), in this particular case for cloud-based email, office suite applications, and records-management services. In the RFQ, it also made what it thought was a routine stipulation: Data centers, if located outside the United States, should be located in country designated by the Trade Agreements Act (TAA). A few months later, in October, it learned that it in fact made a serious misstep when the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a protest decision telling GSA to recompete the solicitation, because the criteria by which the TAA sets the country of origin of a service depends on where the service company itself is established, not where the service is performed.