The RFP process is interesting enough to begin with, however, the current ettiquite of the RFP process is working towards the detriment of it's beneficiaries.

The email notifications from many companies, weeks after the deadline of requesting a proposal, is usually something to the effect :  "Sorry for taking so long to get back to you, we were overwhelmed with responses, and it took us this long to get to the point where we... limited the field to you... , or,  made a decision otherwise..."

For example; we often ask very simple questions following the submission of our proposals.

These questions are typically :
Where are you with your decision making process? (30 days after a decision was supposed to have occurred)
Who won, and why? (on notification someone else was chosen).

When we enquire as to the company chosen, we normally get an awkward silence.

In effect these individuals are saying, 'we understand it might have taken alot of time for you to prepare a specific bid for a solution to a problem that we requested. However, you aint it and we won't tell you why."

How does this ettiquite assist the marketplace?

If vendors are aware of who's winning the bids, then they can intellgently look at the winner and decide to develop a solution to match/beat the offering (not a bad second alternative for the requestor). Or the vendor might choose to specialize in another direction (helping to minimize non-targetted proposals) after a few repeat decisions in a specific venue, channel, marketplace or industry.

Enter hyperempowerment.

You can change that.

'We' can tweet, or blog or SMS or whatever we do, and let RFP proposal writers know that this ettiquite can change (starting with themselves) thereby assisting the proposal writers with enough information to intelligently adjust to their own environment.

This saves time, energy, duplication of efforts, and provides valuable information to everyone involved how to make better decisions for themselves and the clients they are trying to serve.

If you agree we need to change this ettiquite, you can simply re-tweet, reblog or distribute this idea into your network, and perhaps the whole future of proposal writers will have already seen the great support for this change in ettiquite and assist us all in their personal response processes.

I believe if people see the support, they can self-adjust or at least begin to support a process towards change in their organizations. This can be achieved by pointing to the various sources of external support of the idea.

For more information on hyper-empowerment, hyper-intelligence and other social engagement trends I highly recommend watching this video by Mark Pesce  : Video (Sharing Power)

 I encourage your thoughts.