Who signs supplier contracts? Finance? Procurement? Legal? The business?
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In the Government Dept I work in, there are specific procurement delegations that stipulate who should sign contracts. In the case of contracts for new ICT services, software and hardware contracts and maintenance, a single Deputy Secretary (Secretary/CEO direct report), holds the delegation to approve the procurement and sign the contract regardless of value. It has proven confusing as many hold financial delegations and believe they have due authority to procure and sign contracts associated with the exercise of assigned financial delegations.
As CIO this is out of step with my other experiences and certainly disempowering. We are working to revisit these arrangements but I do not expect that Legal or Procurement will be assigned authority to sign contracts.
The process may vary between companies but overall I believe that most adopt the following approach.
Contracts for the acquisition of Digital/IT equipment and/or services are reviewed by Digital/IT, Finance, Procurement and Legal, and are signed by Digital/IT Directors/Execs.
Contracts for the implementation of projects using Digital/IT technologies in business functions, are usually review by the requesting function, Digital/IT, Finance, Procurement and Legal; they are signed by a function Director/Exec and a Digital/IT Director/Exec.
Most of our contracts demand two signatures.
We are a state agency so procurement signs all agreements.
Anyone in the business who has the signing authority (trypically a list of execs reviewed by Legal).
Legal reviews the contracts but the beneficiary business lead signs it.
The business owns and signs the contracts in my experience.