The barriers and challenges for successful public e-procurement in the EU

Philippe Lebaube is Head of Unit at the Office for Official Publications of the European Commission, based in Luxembourg. Mr Lebaube is the author of "Public Procurement on the Internet - What are the trends for the EC?" The document, and several others written by Mr Lebaube, may be downloaded for further reading from the library at: http://circa.europa.eu/Public/irc/opoce/eproc/library?l=/public&vm=detailed&sb=Title

In an e-mail interview, we asked Mr Lebaube to give us his personal, not official, views on the challenges for government e-procurement in the EU:

Question

Taking an overview of Europe, what have been the main obstacles in setting up e-procurement infrastructures?

Answer

I would say the main obstacles are (not in order of importance):

• lack of agreed European standards for exchanging information related to eProcurement
• the current internal organizations of bodies, in particular public ones, is based on "paper" procedures. Approval, financial, budgeting, audit, procedures are mainly based on "paper".
• eProcurement tools are covering only a part of the whole eProcurement processes (from notification to eTendering, ordering, paying, online auction, ....
• classification systems used in eProcurement (e.g. CPV - Common procurement vocabularies, UNSPSC - Universal  standard products and services classification, NUTS - Nomenclature of Territorial Units, ...) are difficult to use or not known. They seem too detailed for awarding authorities when preparing their notices, not detailed enough for companies looking for business opportunities
• the cost (the entry price) for starting an eProcurement project is still too high and resources consuming, only the major awarding authorities or tenderers or companies can afford such an input
• interoperability between eProcurement systems/services is not a reality
• lack of unique or harmonised directories for identifying public administrations. Such directories exist for private bodies but not for public administrations
• agreed and harmonised authentication and security features are not in place, each eProcurement service is using its own security/authentication mechanisms, a global approach is needed, based on agreed standards, protocols and SLA (Service Level Agreements)

Question

With the UK government stating it wants a full e-government service on line by 2005, what problems could they face in getting e-procurement initiatives fully functional by that date?

Answer

For the problems: see above. In addition, I believe that 2005 seems a very short period of time due to the fact that "off-the-shelves" or "interoperable" solutions are not yet available.

Question

With e-procurement to encourage and enhance cross-border trading, what problems/benefits have governments experienced setting up their own "stand-alone" infrastructures?

Answer

For the problems: see above question 1

For the benefits: see below.

Since "off-the-shelves" or "standardised" or "interoperable" solutions are not available, it is somewhat understandable that governments are implementing their own solutions. These governments are pioneering and learning from their experiences in many areas:

• legal obstacles
• administrative aspects
• operational constraints, logistics to be put in place
• standardisation requirements
• infrastructure and their scalability
• cost and budget needs
• not speaking about training and raising awareness for of their staff, the decision makers, the politicians and lobbies.

The Office for Official Publications may be contacted via its website: http://eur-op.eu.int 

Best Practice in eProcurement

IDA publishes case studies on best practice in eProcurement for public administrations on a regular basis. A full list of other current studies may be found in the eProcurement section  of the eGovernment Observatory.