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One suspicion going around is that the tender process was rigged with the award predetermined to go to AIM. My hunch is quite the opposite: that no vendors wanted the project and AIM ended up picking up the pieces as a favour to the TCs. This theory is supported by the fact that their bid was submitted after the tender closing date. If the tender was to go to AIM all along, it would have had the bid ready way before the closing date.
I don’t believe there’s much value in the software after it is retired, which if I’m not wrong is just a customised Oracle ERP module. The $25,030 amount made by AIM over more than two years is quite a pathetic sum that bigger companies such as NCS won’t bother with. So it was left with the smaller SMEs who might be interested, and the SMEs quite rightly regarded it too much of a risk to guarantee that rates with NCS wouldn’t change, plus the risk I mentioned previously of the contract being terminated prematurely by the TCs.
Were the requirements of the tender too stringent then? Probably. One of the companies who collected the tender documents said that there was too little information in them to make a judgement call. So it looks like the tender wasn’t prepared properly, and this again supports the theory no companies bid for it as a result and AIM then took on the contract.
If this is correct, it may be why PAP is so reluctant to reveal more—because they took the easy way out and awarded the contract without a second tender. But it would be nothing as sinister as what some are speculating.
Motivations for deal
If the above is correct, the question is then why are the TCs so desperate to sell away the software after an unsuccessful tender call? Honestly, there could be dozens of possible reasons.
For example, there could be cash flow problems and an urgent need for cash that the sale proceeds would generate. This would be worrying for residents but seems unlikely because the amount was not sizeable compared to the balance sheets these town councils are carrying.
Perhaps no TC wanted to take ownership of the managing of the relationship with NCS, so collectively the convenient thing to do was to outsource this ownership?
The most likely reason as I see it is the database jointly owned by the TCs that contains sensitive financial data. Co-ownership of such an asset by PAP and opposition TCs becomes very tricky if you don’t want the other party to be privy to your finances. How do you deny AHTC the right to access the database if it has equal ownership to it? So to sell it to a third party is a smart thing to do so that no TC can claim this right. Now that it belongs to AIM, a PAP-owned company, AHTC quite rightly decided to build their own software and database as well in order to protect their own sensitive data.
- http://www.voiddecker.com/2013/01/a-different-look-at-this-aimishambles/
I don’t believe there’s much value in the software after it is retired, which if I’m not wrong is just a customised Oracle ERP module. The $25,030 amount made by AIM over more than two years is quite a pathetic sum that bigger companies such as NCS won’t bother with. So it was left with the smaller SMEs who might be interested, and the SMEs quite rightly regarded it too much of a risk to guarantee that rates with NCS wouldn’t change, plus the risk I mentioned previously of the contract being terminated prematurely by the TCs.
Were the requirements of the tender too stringent then? Probably. One of the companies who collected the tender documents said that there was too little information in them to make a judgement call. So it looks like the tender wasn’t prepared properly, and this again supports the theory no companies bid for it as a result and AIM then took on the contract.
If this is correct, it may be why PAP is so reluctant to reveal more—because they took the easy way out and awarded the contract without a second tender. But it would be nothing as sinister as what some are speculating.
Motivations for deal
If the above is correct, the question is then why are the TCs so desperate to sell away the software after an unsuccessful tender call? Honestly, there could be dozens of possible reasons.
For example, there could be cash flow problems and an urgent need for cash that the sale proceeds would generate. This would be worrying for residents but seems unlikely because the amount was not sizeable compared to the balance sheets these town councils are carrying.
Perhaps no TC wanted to take ownership of the managing of the relationship with NCS, so collectively the convenient thing to do was to outsource this ownership?
The most likely reason as I see it is the database jointly owned by the TCs that contains sensitive financial data. Co-ownership of such an asset by PAP and opposition TCs becomes very tricky if you don’t want the other party to be privy to your finances. How do you deny AHTC the right to access the database if it has equal ownership to it? So to sell it to a third party is a smart thing to do so that no TC can claim this right. Now that it belongs to AIM, a PAP-owned company, AHTC quite rightly decided to build their own software and database as well in order to protect their own sensitive data.
- http://www.voiddecker.com/2013/01/a-different-look-at-this-aimishambles/
