Trademark ADP System

Patent Office Should Analyze Alternatives Before Contract Award Gao ID: IMTEC-87-44 August 27, 1987

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the need and justification for the Department of Commerce's Patent and Trademark Office's (PTO) procurement of replacement hardware and software for its automated trademark system.

GAO found that: (1) PTO did not compare alternatives before deciding to continue with its revised procurement strategy of relieving immediate capacity problems only; (2) computer response times and availability were not the cause of work-load backlogs; (3) PTO did not take action such as work-load levelling to improve response time; (4) PTO lacks an adequate computer capacity management program; and (5) the system's short-term disk storage capacity was sufficient for another year.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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