SOTIP as a Model for Outsourcing of Telecom Services for the Public Sector

The political intentions for the past 20 years have broadly speaking been to reduce the number of publicly owned and publicly run activities. Outsourcing is an often applied way to cut public spending by totally or partially privatize public activities. Telecommunications is an obvious outsourcing candidate as it is hardly a core activity for the public sector. Furthermore, there is today a competitive market for telecommunications services. At the same time it can be difficult to separate telecommunications from other activities as every organization's processes and virtually all employees use telecommunications services. Sweden was one of the first countries in the world to introduce full competition on the telecom market and exposed to the new ways to procure and outsource telecom services. A SOTIP (Swedish government Open Telecommunications systems Interconnection Profile) model for procurement of telecommunications services outgoing from users' needs was developed in order to meet these new requirements. A buyer or outsourcer can use SOTIP as a checklist in order to avoid mistakes by forgetting some important requirements.