An Empirical Analysis of the Acceptance of E-Procurement in the German Public Sector

The increasing governmental spending and simultaneously declining income of municipality are one of the most significant challenges of the 21th century. The introduction of the Internet and innovative information and communication tools in the last few decades have led to a cost saving and efficiency advantage in many areas. By far, the public administration has not fully participated from these opportunities and advantages. This article seeks to understand the underlying barriers of technology implementation, namely e-procurement, within the public administration area by analyzing the key barriers of central decision makers within the organization. The empirical findings of 289 respondents from the German public administration show that the barrier typologies are identified and that they have a strong impact on the resistance of implementation. However, the collected data could not verify the theoretically postulated relationship between high resistance and low implementation of the new technology