Government buys technology more slowly than anyone else. A 2022 Gartner survey found decisions take 22 months on average, the longest of any sector. The cause is not what you would guess. In the same survey, 68 percent of those decisions were delayed because the team could not get enough product and requirements detail from providers. 48 percent hit six or more separate delays. The bottleneck is market information, and it arrives after the clock has started.
If you run IT at a mid-size Canadian municipality, you already live this. In most of these towns there is no chief information officer at all. The senior IT person is a manager or coordinator under the Director of Corporate Services. A 2025 Euna report found many departments run full-cycle procurement with teams of one to three people. The same research, citing the National Cooperative Procurement Partners, puts the average project at 87 hours of staff time, about half of it spent writing requirements. Half of the most costly document your team makes is a description of a market nobody has seen.
The portals start after the hard part
BC Bid, MERX, and Biddingo do their jobs well. But a tender portal only meets your project after the requirements exist. By the time a solicitation is posted, every consequential decision is already made: the scope, the criteria, the weighting, the capabilities you believe are out there. The portal distributes those decisions. It cannot inform them.
So the learning happens somewhere else. For most municipalities that somewhere is a mix of cold vendor pitches, a conference hallway, and whatever the neighbouring region bought last year. None of those is a view of the market. They are samples of whoever happened to reach you.
The slow part is walking in blind
Posting is not the slow part. Teams arrive at the RFP blind and use the solicitation itself as their first real look at the market. Every question that should have been answered beforehand becomes a clarification round, an addendum, an extension. That is where the 22 months go.
Here is the calmer path. Market awareness is allowed to happen before, and outside, any solicitation. Nothing in your procurement policy bars you from knowing what exists. And below the tender thresholds, many purchases need no RFP at all. So the formal process you are bracing for may never apply. For 2026 to 2027 the trade-agreement floor is 139,000 dollars for goods or services, and your own purchasing bylaw usually sets a lower bar. Most of the lost time is recoverable. Most of it is spent learning things you could have learned earlier, in parallel, at low stakes.
How to see the market with a thin team
The discipline fits a small team because everything happens in writing, and everything happens once. Four habits carry it.
Write the criteria before you talk to anyone
Before the first vendor conversation, write down what would make a tool acceptable. Six headings cover most municipal purchases:
- Capability: the three to five things the tool must do, written as outcomes, not features
- Security posture: the certifications and questionnaire answers you will need anyway
- Data residency: where the data lives, stated plainly
- Accessibility: the standard your jurisdiction requires
- Support: hours, channels, and escalation, in writing
- Budget band: the range you could defend to council
This is the same work the NCPP research says eats about half of a project's 87 hours. Doing it early adds nothing. It moves the effort to where being wrong is cheap, and where the fix is an edit instead of an addendum.
Collect stakeholder input once, in writing
A 2024 Forrester report counts about 13 people in a typical software purchase, and 89 percent of purchases span two or more departments. Thirteen people cannot meet their way to consensus on your timeline. Circulate the draft criteria one time. Ask each person to add, strike, and weight, in writing. Disagreements show up as edits, where they are easy to settle, instead of as objections in month nine, where they are not. The document becomes the consensus, so consensus never needs a meeting.
Get answers you can compare, not demos
A demo is a vendor-paced answer to questions you did not ask. Gartner found in 2019 that 89 percent of buyers rate the information they meet as high quality, yet contradictory from one supplier to the next. That is what polished presentations produce when you cannot lay them side by side. Send every vendor the same questions in the same structure. Read the answers in one table. Contradictions that would have surfaced in month eleven surface in week one. Demos still happen, just later, for the two or three tools that earned the time.
Keep what you learn on file
File the criteria, the weights, and the responses. When another department needs adjacent software next year, it starts from a living record of the market instead of from zero. For a team of one to three people, that file is the institutional memory the org chart says you cannot afford.
Three doors, all of them better
Once the field is in front of you, the first door is the cheapest. If a strong fit sits below your tender threshold, engage the vendor directly. No solicitation required. If the timing is wrong, keep the field on file; the work holds its value. And if a formal procurement is required, write it informed: a sharper, better-scoped RFP whose requirements describe what the market can deliver.
That last door matters more than it looks. Euna's 2025 report found that 62 percent of public agencies receive only two to five bids per RFP. A thin response is partly a requirements problem. Vendors skip documents that read as vague, contradictory, or shaped around an incumbent. An RFP written after you have seen the field scopes to a real budget band. It reads as winnable to the vendors who fit. Better awareness going in tends to mean a better field coming back.
Where PartnerAZ fits
PartnerAZ runs this stage, inverted. It is the pre-discovery layer for public-sector and enterprise buying teams across Canada. Instead of you finding vendors and sending questionnaires, you set your scoring criteria privately. Qualified vendors apply to you without seeing those criteria. So no one can shape a pitch to a rubric they cannot read. Your whole team sees every applicant ranked by fit, scored per criterion, in numbers an evaluator can question and adjust. It is free for buyers. There is no unsolicited outreach, ever, and it takes no cut of any deal. It does not replace your RFP, RFI, or procurement tools. It feeds them.
Vendors pay to be seen. They can never pay to rank. Your list is ordered by fit, which is the whole point of it.
The takeaway: discovery is backwards. You should not have to hunt for software while fending off everyone selling it.
The right software should apply to you, scored to what you actually need, visible to your whole team. See the market first, and everything after it gets easier. Start on the how it works page.