Jim Tillman, CPPO, C.P.M. is a contributing author to this site. He has served in the Public Procurement profession for over 45 years, managing Federal, Utility, County and City procurement operations.

The numbers alone are staggering evidence of public procurement's potential impact: hundreds of billions of dollars spent on contracts for goods, services, technology and construction each year.  But the impact of government procurement is far more than fiscal. 

First and foremost, government "works" through its contracts. If its contracting mechanisms are effective, government can be effective; if they are not, government service delivery founders. We all have a stake in effective government contracting, because it is our tax dollars that are at work in government contracts, and the goods and services procured are intended for our benefit. Wasteful or secretive or corrupt contracting erodes confidence in government at a fundamental level. 

Governments also look to their contracting policies to fuel economic growth. Government spending on contracts ripples through the economy. Government waste snowballs, making a region less competitive in the battle to attract industry. Conversely, effective procurement also has exponential impact, because residents and businesses get more from government for the tax dollars they must pay, and so the region attracts private sector investment. Protectionist policies favoring one group or another may have a short term effect but in the long run true competitiveness depends on strength without protectionism. A competitive government fuels a productive society.

Those who have tried to improve government contracting realize that procurement is a core process of government whose improvement will impact all the other core processes of government. Effective procurement requires long term strategic planning, a budgeting and contracting cycle that is not restricted to a single fiscal year and that rejects the "use it or lose it" principal, mechanisms to recoup savings in real dollars in the budget so that they can be realized in a concrete manner, personnel policies that provide incentives for professional growth in the field of procurement management. Public procurement in which citizens have confidence requires open access to information about competitive opportunities, the procurement decision making process, and performance records of government contractors. Information technology can be an enabler of all these changes, and nowhere more powerfully than in managing the contract/procurement spending of government.