What happened
Austin Water structured its EAM procurement across distinct artifacts including a strategic vision and business capability model, detailed business use cases, functional and technical requirements, and an implementation plan. Its implementation requirements continued traceability through design, configuration, testing and acceptance rather than treating requirements solely as vendor-selection artifacts.
Why it matters
A vendor's agreement with a requirement establishes much less than successful implementation. If the operating reason behind the requirement disappears during procurement, the buyer can lose sight of what the requirement was supposed to accomplish. If traceability stops after selection, the buyer can also lose the connection between the original promise and evidence that the implemented capability actually works.
What a buyer should do
For each consequential requirement, record why it exists, the operating scenario it must support, how proposals will be evaluated against it, how the selected approach will implement it, and what evidence will be required for acceptance. Preserve that chain as the requirement moves through the buying and implementation process.
Give important requirements two anchors: one backward to the operating need that created them and one forward to the evidence that will prove they were satisfied.