Despite ambitious goals back in 2014 and years of development since, the current legal framework has failed to deliver the transformational benefits originally envisioned for electronic procurement. In fact, it has actually become a barrier to meaningful digital innovation in public procurement processes. The Commission's recent initiatives in this space, like eForms and the Public Procurement Data Space (PPDS), while well-intentioned, are unlikely to address the fundamental limitations arising from the legal framework. The Commission's strategy of pursuing asymmetric evolution, where some bits are mandatory while others remain optional, fails to understand the incentives driving Member States, contracting authorities, and procurement officers.

The fundamental issue with electronic procurement within the EU lies in how the Directive approached digitisation. Rather than re-imagining procurement for the digital age, it simply converted existing analogue processes into digital ones. This approach resulted in a system that, while more efficient than its paper-based predecessor, falls far short of its transformative potential.

The two notable electronic innovations from 2014 - the European Single Procurement Document (ESPD) and eCertis - demonstrate both the potential and limitations of the current approach. These tools, which represent the only true digital innovations in the Directives, show how electronic means can achieve what wasn't possible before. However, their effectiveness is severely limited by their isolation from wider administrative systems and data sources. In the case of eCertis this is compounded by its legal nature as a mere repository of information and not a canonical source of information.

Data quality and completeness remain significant challenges. The current system captures data only from the contracts covered by the Directives, while the remaining sitting in national data silos. Since there is no obligation to send information to TED for contracts not covered by the Directives, what happens below thresholds is unknown. Not that simply making it mandatory for those contracts as well would solve the problem as the lack of compliance with contract award notices is well known too.

The fundamental mistake of the system is the reliance on the outdated concept of notices as vehicles for information and data capture. They made sense in the 19th century when contract information was being nailed on a board outside the door of a city hall, not in 2025. Virtually all data that is captured on these via a menial work of filling in fields that are to be uploaded afterwards to TED is already present in the databases of electronic platforms. If only we had spent some time designing how these electronic systems should work, and how to access data sitting on them instead of ignoring that bit and focusing instead on notices and how these are sent to TED. The structured data captured via eForms should instead be captured directly by the electronic platforms themselves.

Looking at international examples, it's telling that the most innovative electronic procurement systems today exist outside the EU. Countries like Ukraine, Paraguay, and North Macedonia have implemented more advanced, transaction-based systems that automatically capture procurement data, rather than relying on manual notice submissions.

(A) path forward

The path forward requires action on three fronts. First, the EU needs to replace the current legal framework with one that enables the development of a digital-first procurement system. This means starting with the question: "If we were designing public procurement today with the tools available now, how would it look?" Somehow, despite us being at the start of a revision process I do not see appetite for an exercise like this and fear that we will simply have incremental improvements.

Second, the new system must be designed with data capture at its core, moving away from the current notification-based approach built around notices and towards a transaction-based system. This would enable automation of many menial tasks currently performed manually by procurement officers and improve data quality through automatic capture rather than manual input. With this in mind, platforms should be regulated at EU level instead of national at the very least in terms of what data is to be captured directly by them and where such data should flow. And if their differences are treated as a non-tariff trade barrier, the better.

Third, public procurement must be recognised as an integral component of broader public administration. The success of electronic procurement depends on its ability to interface with other administrative systems and data sources. The recent Interoperable Europe Act, which connects the digitisation of public administrations to the internal market and cross-border interoperability, might provide a model for this integration.

Finally, the Commission's current focus on improving data quality and completeness, while important, reveals a significant gap between collecting better data and achieving better decision-making in procurement. Without addressing the underlying structural issues, the goal of data-driven procurement decisions remains a distant aspiration rather than an achievable objective.

As we look towards the future of electronic procurement in the EU, it's clear that incremental improvements within the current framework won't be sufficient. What's needed is a fundamental rethinking of how public procurement should work in the digital age, supported by legislation that understands this new reality instead of simply keeping on deploying the same mental models from 2014.