Tuesday, June 17, 2008, Hotel Golf Concordia, 11:00 - 12:30

Chair:
Josef Makolm, Head of IT-Audit
Directorate General V - Information Technology, Federal Ministry of Finance, Austria

Panelists:
Claudia Bachkönig, International Affairs Federal Computing Centre, Austria
Maria A. Wimmer, Professor  Institute for Information Systems Research, University of Koblenz, Faculty of Informatics, Germany

Panel outline  

Public procurement is going to change quickly in the coming years. The European Commission has published an Action Plan on public eProcurement to assist Member States in implementing the new Procurement Directives adopted in 2004.  Moving public procurement on-line promises substantial savings on expenditure and transaction costs for buyers and suppliers. Therefore, the aim is that all public administrations across Europe shall have the capability of carrying out 100% of their procurement electronically and at least 50% of public procurement above the EU public procurement threshold will be carried out electronically. The broader vision is that any company in the EU can communicate with any government in the EU in all areas of eProcurement.
 
Issues to be discussed:

• How are European administrations implementing interoperable electronic processes for all phases of the procurement processes?
• Under the Competitiveness and Innovation Programme (CIP) 16 partners from 10 European countries have set up the "Pan-European Public Procurement On-Line" - short: PEPPOL -  project with the aim to develop an integrated pilot solution enabling cross border access to "public eProcurement". What are the objectives and the proposed impact of the PEPPOL project?
• What organisational, semantic and technical challenges have to be addressed in order to develop a sophisticated Virtual Company Dossier as a prerequisite for cross-boarder transactions?
• The lack of a standard definition of eCatalogues across all EU countries is one of the existing or potential hurdles that all enterprises - and especially SMEs - face when trying to carry out cross-border public eProcurement transactions. How could this obstacle be faced? What does this mean for suppliers?