E-Procurement Implementation in the United States: Understanding Progress in Local Government

Abstract

E-procurement is a rapidly growing area of e-government implementation. Nevertheless, scholarly research on e-procurement implementation is limited, especially at the municipal level. This study presents empirical evidence on city level e-procurement in the United States, based on a data set of the 191 largest cities. This study focuses on two research questions – 1) Does e-procurement progress in a staged manner as suggested about e-government by the stages theory? 2) What factors contribute to the progression of e-procurement systems through the stages? We find not only that e-procurement is more prevalent in the information or cataloging stage than in the transaction stage but that cities with both IT capacity and a council-manager form of government are more likely to be in an advanced stage of e-procurement development. By providing both descriptive statistics along with statistical analysis, this study helps to explain the current status of e-procurement implementation along with the factors that might lead to further implementation.