Use of Social Media in the Public E-Procurement: Implications for Good Governance

2. E-Procurement, Social Media And Governance

Despite the initial hypes and promises, progression in adopting and embracing e-procurement remains relatively low across most of the countries. A study has revealed that the total e-government business (including e-procurement) still only represents 2.2 per cent of turnover in Australia, 1.3 per cent in Canada, and ranges from 0.01 to 17 per cent for European countries (Panduranga, 2016). Some of the vital factors that are inhibiting organizations from adopting e-procurement systems are: high cost of implementation, increase of cost in electronic interface for communication, high training cost for learning e-procurement software, inability to integrate appropriate accountability mechanism to the process, high cost of restructuring organization, and lack of standard response formats for e-procurement (Gurakar & Tas, 2016; Kassim & Hussin, 2013). Considering the challenges, a systematic approach is required to adopt to make the e-procurement process more user-friendly, and acceptable by all concerned. Accordingly, organizations across the developed and developing nations have been trying to introduce more online friendly options including the use of social networking technology to enhance the e-procurement process (Zavattaro, 2013).