Per GFR 2017, CVC Procurement Guidelines, Supreme Court e-Committee norms, and GeM best practices.
| Item | Do | Don't | Remark |
|---|---|---|---|
| Require off-the-shelf, fixed-price products | ✓ Predictable, validated products built by world-class teams. | ✗ Developing tech in-house with no derisking or data economies of scale. | Legacy service companies and governments are unlikely to produce cutting-edge technology in-house. |
| Require ontological architecture | ✓ Formal verification with line-level citations and audit trails. | ✗ Black-box AI with unverifiable outputs. | Every claim must be traceable. Every output auditable (aligns to defensibility and auditability expectations under public procurement). |
| Require comprehensive legal/admin datasets | ✓ Proprietary databases with live, versioned, complete legal/admin data. | ✗ Generic models and GPT wrappers with knowledge cutoffs. | Government work requires daily indexing of new judgments, circulars, amendments, etc.—not Google/GPT. |
| Require operational fluency | ✓ Forward-deployed engineers with domain expertise; on-site process mapping. | ✗ Remote-only support; ticket-based resolution; lawyer- or sales-only teams. | Technology adoption requires hands-on implementation by technically fluent operators. |
| Require public products with real users | ✓ Products that are loved bottom-up survive; forced procurements go to waste. | ✗ Decision-makers captured by fake demos of unavailable products. | Public pilots and real end-users reduce procurement risk and improve defensibility. |
| Avoid non-profit dependencies | ✓ Sustainable commercial model with aligned incentives and transparent data ownership. | ✗ Grant-funded projects with uncertain continuity and opaque data-sharing. | Long-term institutional partnerships require commercial viability and clear incentives. |
| Require platformization AND interoperability | ✓ Pool data into a singular system to reduce exposure; ensure that system is interoperable. | ✗ Point solutions that only do one thing; tools that don't talk to other tools. | Reduces exposure to multiple vendors and cybersecurity points of failure. |
| Require API-based, self-owned data sovereignty | ✓ Self-owned infrastructure with role-based permissions, admin, analytics, and bulk ops. | ✗ Web-only or app-only consumer products with vendor data access. | Government data is sensitive and large volume; must be stored on government servers. |
Source: jhana.ai/courtroom