A Comparative Analysis of Antecedents of Implementation of Electronic Procurement between the National and County Governments in Kenya

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to compare antecedents of implementation of E-procurement between the National and County Governments as public entities in Kenya. Over the last few years, the internet has changed the way business is done in all sectors of the economy be they manufacturing or services industries. The Kenyan government has recognized the importance of adopting use of ICT in service delivery to the public and its citizens due to the benefits that accrue from using the system. One area that is of concern is procurement where introduction of E-procurement as a method of ICT service delivery in the public sector has dramatically changed the way traditional purchasing is done. Both public and private sector institutions have embraced use of E-procurement due to the benefits that come with it. However, even given the potential benefits of e-procurement, most of the Government Ministries and County Governments including parastatals have not effectively implemented the e-procurement practices despite the government efforts in putting the system in place. This study sought to analyze antecedents of implementation of e-procurement in the Ministries and County Governments. The variables under study included top management support, training in IFMIS, technology advancement, procurement laws application, organizational culture and how they impact on e-procurement implementation. The study adopted a descriptive design with a target population of 28,010 using stratified sampling and simple random sampling techniques to come up with sample size of 373 respondent’s .The respondents consisted of staff from various public institutions and suppliers of goods, works and services to those public entities. Questionnaires were used as the main data collection instruments and were pretested using a pilot study for validity and reliability. Descriptive and inferential statistics data analysis results revealed that there were major differences in antecedents of implementation of e-procurement between National and County Governments despite all being Public entities using same procurement laws and regulations in the procurement processes. The study found out that all the variables achieved a percentage of less than 70% at all levels of governments starting with top management support accounted for 22.6% at national and 48.6% at County with training at 19.8% at national and 44% at county, technology 51% at national and 50% at County, procurement laws with 45% at national and 67% at county and finally organizational culture with 56% at national and 46% at County. The study concludes that more efforts be but on all variables in order for e-procurement implementation to be successful at the two levels of goverments.The study recommends that the top management especially thee political class be brought in to support e-procurement and all other factors including technology advancement, training of suppliers and organizational cultural change will automatically fall in place. The study also recommends policy makers to review procurement laws so as to be in line with e-procurement since the current laws does not advocate use of e-procurement and favors manual procurement .The study also recommends future use of Meta-analysis research design to systematically evaluate and summarize the results from a number of various studies on e-procurement in order to develop a new understanding of a research problem using synoptic reasoning. The study further recommends that another research be conducted on benefits that have accrued since introduction of E-procurement which will involve return on investment(ROI) to find out if the system has benefited Kenyans or not.