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Are states effectively managing contracting and procurement activities? Are they striking the right balance between central administrative control and empowerment through delegation? How effective is training and monitoring? How do these practices compare to the principles of best practice? What role will information technology play in the future for procurement and contracting? As part of the Government Performance Project, budget, procurement, and contracting managers in 48 states were surveyed, providing descriptions of their procurement and contracting practices. There are numerous developments that speak to the practical details of contemporary public management. Five key findings are (1) information technology needs are challenging states, with some responding well, but others struggling, (2) in most states staff training needs to be improved, (3) restrictions prohibiting “best value” purchasing need to be removed, (4) states can learn from and improve practices by partnering with other governments and private organizations, and (5) most states use a hybrid of both centralized and decentralized management structures when it comes to contracting and procurement.

This article examines the development of the Internet and electronic procurement or e-procurement in American state governments. I am interested in discerning the extent of adoption of e-procurement, especially as it relates to the use of the Internet in the procurement function. Specifically, eprocurement is examined with data from a national survey of state procurement officers. The first part of this article demonstrates an e-government growth model as a way of modeling the development of e-procurement. The second part examines the existing literature on e-procurement development and challenges associated with its implementation. The third part constructs an eprocurement index, which measures the adoption rate of electronic procurement in each of the states. This e-procurement index is tested against management, organizational, and economic predictor variables. The results of the eprocurement model indicated positive support for electronic procurement on state management capacity and IT management capacity, indicating that high performing management is a critical catalyst for e-procurement development.

This exploratory study aims to look at the policy and public-procurement requirements set forth in state public-private partnership (P3) legislation and their relationship to P3 project implementation.

The research uses both cross-sectional and longitudinal approaches. The paper begins by defining P3s and discussing their increasing importance as a form of private-sector delivery of public facilities and infrastructure. The major policy and procurement requirements of state P3 legislation are then identified. Using the public works financing database of 301 P3 project closures between 1996 and 2016, the relationships between state P3 legislative policy and procurement requirements and P3 project implementation are explored.

The study finds positive associations between 15 of 16 state P3 legislative policy and procurement requirements.

This is the first study of its kinds to explore the relationships between state P3 policy and procurement requirements and P3 project implementation (project closures).

State governments have begun to introduce various eprocurement tools to improve inefficient and ineffective procurement management; however, few empirical studies have documented the diffusion of e-procurement. This study uses data collected from state procurement agencies to examine which e-procurement tools state governments are using as well as to explore what factors affect the adoption of these tools. This study confirms that simple innovations are more rapidly diffused than those that are technically or legally complex. State governments that are more likely to adopt e-procurement tools tend to be larger, managerially innovative, and to have a strong centralized procurement office. Overall, e-procurement is promising technology, but managerial and technical challenges still remain.

This exploratory article examines the issue of state government procurement. It uses original survey data to create a measure of reformed state procurement practices, as suggested by the literature, and explores the ability of several variables from the state policy literature to explain observed differences in state procurement. Findings suggest that the states’ procurement practices possess varying degrees of reform characteristics, that interest group diversity, legislative professionalism, results-oriented management, and regional effects each have significant relationships to state procurement practices, and that several “classic” explanations of state policy are not significantly related to state procurement practices. One implication is that procurement, like other forms of state administrative policy, may not be readily explained by widely utilized theories of state policy.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of program strategy on the implementation of the efficacy of a procurement set-aside program at the state level.

This study examines the impact of program implementation strategy across two administrations considering the most compelling alternative arguments for what drives agency purchasing through contracts with MBEs.

The results of mixed effects linear regression models on the procurement expenditures of 70 state agencies in Ohio from 2008-2015 show significantly higher rates of procurement expenditures with MBEs under the Kasich administration.

These results provide support for the argument that changes in program implementation strategy led to substantive increases in the use of MBEs by state agencies in Ohio.

The use of public procurement as a vehicle for implementing various socioeconomic preference policies has a long history. This article reviews the current state of affairs of procurement preference programs with regard to U.S. state and local governments and analyzes their impact on both the recipients and on the public procurement process. Opportunities for further research are noted, and the authors conclude that the ability to navigate the difficult waters of socioeconomic preferences should be a core competency of state and local public procurement officials.

School business officials procure goods and services through a variety of methods to deliver educational services in a timely and cost-effective way. Recommended practices by professional procurement organizations have changed in recent years to include new technologies aimed at streamlining and cutting costs of traditional procurement methods. Little is known, however, about what procurement practices school districts adopt-new or old. To partially fill this gap, we describe results from a survey of procurement practices of New York State school districts. Our results reveal that despite the potential for new technologies to make certain practices common among all types of districts, competitive bidding laws and enrollment size dictate the procurement methods used most frequently by school districts.

Government’s e-procurement system has not caught on as rapidly as has e-Bay! This article examines the slow implementation rate of public e-procurement systems. It challenges the notion that efficiency gains alone can entice governments to leave traditional procurement systems and principles behind. Four traditional procurement principles are reexamined to see whether they are deterrents to e-commerce: (1) low bid wins and that’s a must; (2) separation between the vendor and user is desirable to avoid claims of favoritism; (3) fixed price and fixed term contracts are best for government; and (4) open access is absolutely imperative in all situations. The jury is still out as to whether the new commerce is contingent upon a reformulation of these principles.

It is unclear as to what extent sustainable procurement is being practised in Ireland and what barriers there are to implementing it in organisations. This study provides the first complete insight into the use of sustainable procurement in Irish commercial semi-state bodies. It explores the extent and type of use of sustainable procurement plus identifies and examines the challenges to its use. A deductive approach is utilised to determine the barriers. Eleven participants, nine from the commercial semistate bodies and two experts with knowledge of this subject, are interviewed using semi-structured questions. The research findings show that sustainable procurement is being practised in the majority of the commercial semi-state bodies. Definition of sustainable procurement, the absence of mandatory guidelines, cost, time and a dearth of sustainable procurement knowledge by suppliers are some of the main barriers put forward by participants.