OMB: Don’t Play Favorites on IT Purchases The Office of Management and Budget is reminding agencies that their IT acquisitions must be “technology and vendor neutral.” In a Jan. 7 memo to chief information officers and senior procurement executives, OMB said agencies must use “merit-based requirements development and evaluation processes that promote procurement choices based on performance and value, and free of preconceived preferences based on how the technology is developed, licensed or distributed. In the context of developing requirements and planning acquisitions for software, for example, this means, as a general matter, that agencies should analyze alternatives that include proprietary, open source, and mixed source technologies.” For years OMB has repeatedly cautioned agencies against specifying brand names in their acquisitions. The risk of such acquisitions was underlined in a Jan. 3 decision by the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The court granted a preliminary injunction blocking the Interior Department from awarding a sole-source contract to Microsoft for e-mail and computer operating system software. Judge Susan Braden said the department’s decision unfairly denied Google the right to compete for the contract.