The Gap That Templates Do Not Close
The standard explanation for failed state technology projects points at the solicitation: requirements frozen too early, scope that cannot absorb discovery, evaluation criteria that reward proposal writing over delivery capability. That explanation describes real damage. It also describes a symptom.
The gap often predates the solicitation, arising where procurement and technical evaluation are staffed as separate disciplines. A procurement officer fluent in State Finance and Procurement Article compliance, participation goal calculation, and Board of Public Works approval sequencing is not thereby equipped to judge whether a proposed integration approach will survive contact with a legacy eligibility system, whether a vendor's described delivery cadence matches how its teams actually work, or whether a quoted migration timeline accounts for data remediation that nobody has scoped. Those are technical judgment calls. When no one making them sits on the evaluation panel, the contract document is the primary protection the state has specified, and contract language is a limited instrument for governing technical delivery.
This is why template libraries, intake portals and procurement playbooks — all genuinely useful — do not by themselves close this gap. A better template produces a better-structured solicitation. It does not tell an evaluator that the architecture described in a winning proposal will require expensive rework. Reusable documents scale process. They do not scale judgment.
What the Act Actually Requires
The Procurement Reform Act of 2025 was an Administration bill, House Bill 500, enacted as Chapter 601, signed May 20, 2025. The Act took effect October 1, 2025. Section 3.5-205 sets no deadline by which DoIT must have the team established.
The Department of Legislative Services fiscal note describes the mandate in specific terms. § 3.5-205 requires DoIT to establish a technical procurement team that includes individuals with expertise in technology procurement and agile procurement. In collaboration with the Department of General Services, the team must develop materials that encourage cost-effective and cost-efficient IT services spending, including procurement templates, procurement contracts and other procurement materials. The team may also assist a unit of State government, including DGS itself, to procure IT services — specifically by drafting requests for proposals, reviewing bids and selecting vendors, and developing IT service contracts in a manner that encourages competition and full vendor participation.
Read the verbs carefully, because they are not the same verb. Building the template library is mandatory: the team *must* develop those materials. Participating in a live procurement is permissive: the team *may* assist a unit. That distinction is the most consequential design choice in the provision, and it is examined below.
Two further elements of the Act's structure matter for how the team operates. The team sits in DoIT, while DGS retains procurement authority through the Chief Procurement Officer. Technical judgment and procurement governance therefore live in different departments and must be reconciled rather than exercised by one office. Separately, the Act clarified in State Finance and Procurement Article § 11-101 that the statutory definition of "services" includes information technology services and cybersecurity, and that "supplies" includes IT hardware and software — a definitional cleanup that, per the Chief Procurement Officer's implementation memorandum, may produce a more expedited process for certain IT hardware and software contracts.
On cost, the fiscal note itemizes DoIT's FY 2026 estimate at $728,219 for six positions — a partial year running from October 1. The remaining $112,629 of the total $840,800 funds one Assistant Attorney General. Figures rise to $1,020,700 in FY 2027 and $1,160,600 by FY 2030, reflecting annualization and inflation adjustments.
Implementation Ran Behind the Effective Date
The Chief Procurement Officer's September 30, 2025 memorandum to Maryland procurement staff, issued the day before the Act took effect, is a useful document for anyone planning a similar reform, because it shows what a statutory effective date does and does not mean.
The memo walked through eleven provisions taking effect October 1, 2025 — Small Business Reserve expansion to procurements of $1,000,000 or less, participation goal modification authority, fifteen-day prompt payment for Small Business Reserve contracts, oral presentation thresholds, the IT definitional changes and others. The technical procurement team is not among those eleven provisions. The memo does not specify which additional Act tasks it deferred to 2026; it asked staff only to await further updates.
The Governor's FY 2027 budget allowance, as analyzed by the Department of Legislative Services, included two regular positions and five contractual full-time equivalents to implement Chapter 601. The contractual staffing is relevant to the retention question addressed below.
The memo also flagged a transition condition worth noting: Code of Maryland Regulations updates would lag the statute because of regulatory timelines, potentially creating a period in which regulation and statute conflict; during any such period the statute controls. States copying this model should expect the same gap and plan guidance for it.
That sequencing — statutory authority first, operating positions requested in the following budget cycle — is what the Maryland record shows. Standing up a multidisciplinary team requires position descriptions, classification decisions, and recruitment against a template corpus that does not exist on day one. A statutory effective date and the date outcomes change are therefore different milestones; the Maryland sequence illustrates the gap without establishing how long it takes to close.
The Two Questions That Decide Whether It Works
Does the team's involvement bind anyone? Because assistance with live procurements is permissive in § 3.5-205(b)(2), nothing in that section requires a unit of state government to request the team's help or to adopt its findings. Consider the operational consequence through a hypothetical: a technical reviewer reads a winning proposal and concludes the vendor's described data migration approach understates remediation effort by a wide margin. If the review is advisory, that conclusion is a memo. The agency, which may have invested substantial time reaching this procurement and may have budget obligations tied to an award date, can proceed under § 3.5-205. Other oversight mechanisms — including DoIT's MITDP Oversight Division established under Chapters 845 and 846 of 2025 and Board of Public Works approval — provide separate checks on major technology projects.
The question for any state considering this model is therefore not whether to create technical review capacity but where to attach it in the approval chain. Review that is available on request affects the procurements of agencies that already wanted help. Review that is a condition of approval above a dollar threshold affects the procurements where evaluation errors are most consequential. Those are different reforms with different legislative complexity, and the second is harder to pass because it relocates authority away from agencies.
Can the state keep the people? The statute requires technology and agile procurement expertise. The DLS fiscal note estimated the team at a technical procurement director and five program managers; the Governor's FY 2027 budget allowance added two regular positions and five contractual full-time equivalents for Chapter 601 implementation. As of December 31, 2025, DoIT carried 34 vacant positions, 21 of them never filled, according to the Department of Legislative Services' FY 2027 analysis of DoIT's budget. Maryland's General Assembly recognized the broader challenge: Chapter 871 of 2026 (HB 1335) requires an independent study of IT and cybersecurity staffing needs across the principal departments of the Executive Branch, including recommendations on position classifications and pay scales, with findings due November 1, 2027. Whether a technical procurement team faces those same vacancy pressures is a question the staffing study may help answer.
What matters institutionally is that the team's value is cumulative. A reviewer who has worked through several benefits-platform procurements across different agencies evaluates each subsequent one with greater precision — not because of abstract expertise, but because they have a record of which vendor claims have held up in that state's specific environment. Turnover does not merely create a vacancy; it resets that accumulated record.
Two mitigations are worth considering at design time rather than after the first departures. The first is to make the template and evaluation corpus the durable asset — written findings, scoring rationales and post-award delivery notes that outlive the individuals who produced them. The second is to treat the team as a rotation that deliberately returns team members to agency delivery roles, which converts turnover from pure loss into distributed capability, provided the state is honest that it is staffing a pipeline rather than a permanent bench.
The Alternative, and When It Is Reasonable
The alternative to building this capacity is to keep buying it: retain advisory firms or systems integrators to supply technical evaluation on major procurements. For states running a small number of large technology procurements each cycle, a permanent multidisciplinary team may not be cost-effective, and engaging outside expertise per procurement can be a reasonable use of money.
The approach degrades under a specific condition: when the buyer cannot independently assess the advice. An agency that cannot evaluate a recommendation is dependent on it, and has no reliable way to detect when a recommendation reflects the advisor's commercial position rather than the state's interest — a risk that sharpens when the advisor's affiliates are eligible for downstream implementation work. Internal capacity is not primarily about saving fees. It is about retaining the ability to audit the advice you buy.
A reasonable read of the tradeoff: states with sustained, high-volume technology demand across multiple agencies have the throughput to justify permanent capacity. States with episodic demand should buy expertise per engagement, while deliberately protecting enough internal technical literacy to evaluate what they are told — a smaller and cheaper commitment than a full team. That protected floor — enough internal technical literacy to evaluate outside advice — is easier to describe than to maintain against budget pressure.
What To Check Next
For a state CIO or procurement executive evaluating whether this model fits:
- Measure the current gap before proposing a remedy. For technology procurements above a chosen threshold in the last two fiscal years, determine how many had a participant with technical credentials on the evaluation panel. That proportion, not a national benchmark, is the case for change.
- Decide the authority question explicitly. Draft whether technical review is available on request or required above a threshold, and price both. Discovering the answer by practice means discovering it as advisory.
- Locate the team deliberately. Placement in the IT department versus the procurement department determines which office's priorities govern when the two disagree. Maryland split them; that is a choice with coordination costs, not a default.
- Plan for the implementation lag. The Maryland sequence ran from the October 2025 effective date to positions appearing in the following budget cycle, with no statutory deadline in between. Set legislative and executive expectations for that gap.
- Make judgment durable. Require written evaluation rationales and post-award delivery retrospectives from the outset, so the institutional record survives staff turnover.
Maryland's provision is worth watching precisely because the design questions are visible in the statutory text rather than buried in implementation. Over the next several procurement cycles, the measurable question is narrow: do bid evaluations that include technical review produce different awards than those that do not? If they do not, the state has funded an advisory function. If they do, it has changed how a state buys technology, and the model earns replication.
Spartan X advises state leadership on AI strategy, architecture and implementation — including engagements with Colorado's Department of Labor and Employment, the Office of Information Technology and the Governor's office, and an extension of that model to Florida in 2025. That advisory work intersects with the gap this statute addresses: for a state beginning major AI platform procurements, the evaluation questions embedded in vendor selection are the same ones a technical procurement team would need to answer. External advisory capacity can help build that internal evaluation literacy before procurement decisions are made, and the Maryland statute addresses the same gap.
Sources and further reading
- Maryland House Bill 500 (2025), Procurement Reform Act of 2025, Department of Legislative Services Fiscal and Policy Note, Enrolled – Revised: https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2025RS/fnotes/bil_0000/hb0500.pdf
- Chapter 601 of 2025, enrolled text of House Bill 500 (§ 3.5-205 establishing the technical procurement team): https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2025RS/Chapters_noln/CH_601_hb0500e.pdf
- Wallace D. Sermons II, Chief Procurement Officer, Office of State Procurement, "Implementation of the Procurement Reform Act," memorandum to Maryland procurement staff, September 30, 2025: https://procurement.maryland.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2024/11/Implementation-of-the-Procurement-Reform-Act-Official-Memo.pdf
- Maryland General Assembly legislation detail page for House Bill 500 (2025 Regular Session): https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Legislation/Details/hb0500?ys=2025RS
- Maryland House Bill 1335 (2026), enacted as Chapter 871 of 2026, requiring an independent study of IT and cybersecurity staffing needs across the principal departments of the Executive Branch, due November 1, 2027: https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Legislation/Details/hb1335?ys=2026RS
- Maryland House Bill 1335 (2026) fiscal note (Third Reader – Revised): https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2026RS/fnotes/bil_0005/hb1335.pdf
- Maryland Department of Legislative Services, Department of Information Technology FY 2027 Budget Analysis (F50, p.23): vacancy data as of December 31, 2025 and FY 2027 position allowance for Chapter 601 implementation: https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/pubs/budgetfiscal/2027fy-budget-docs-operating-F50-Department-of-Information-Technology.pdf
