Most state governments' procurement processes and procedures are technologically fragmented. Historically, this has been in many instances due to the organizational structures in place to support procurement -- even in those states with fairly centralized procurement organizations. A number of state governments have made progress in using technology to reduce that fragmentation, however, until the past few years the technology did not permit the integrated flow of information between the members of the states' procurement communities.

Technology is now available to integrate a state's "procurement chain" in a manner that eliminates the inefficiencies in the process that annually cost states millions of dollars. (This "open systems" technology has been developed by private industry to support supply chain integration needs using the internet, and includes such open systems capabilities as Web Services, Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)). In addition, the resulting community-wide view of the information produced via a statewide electronic, online, open systems procurement chain would enable annual savings of millions of dollars in the cost of acquiring goods and services and in the cost of the goods and services themselves.

Informs has hundreds of years of large government purchasing systems function and technical business expertise, which has been successfully employed to successfully implement large scale purchasing systems for seven state governments. Thousands of users apply those implemented systems to purchase billions of dollars of goods and services each year.