Why do civil servants accept digital change? The case of e-public procurement in Belgium

The rapid digitalization of society and economy, the growing demand for tailored and citizen-driven services and the quest for openness of government operations and decisions have bought tremendous changes and challenges to the public sectors. The digital transformation of public organizations, based on and caused by the rapid development of new technologies, requires specific knowledge, skills, values, attitudes and behaviors. In particular, various scholars have agreed that the success of the digitalization projects depends mainly on their acceptance by civil servants. However, we do not know why civil servants accept digital change. To answer this question, I examine the digitalization of public procurement in Belgium, looking at factors related to digitalization and to civil servants themselves. I relied on a mixed quantitative-qualitative methodology following the triangulation model as proposed by Creswell (2006): after a survey among 220 Belgian civil servants from the federal, regional and local levels, focus groups were conducted with the main public officials concerned by public procurement in Belgium. The triangulation of results showed that six factors have been validated quantitatively and qualitatively to have a significant influence on the attitude of civil servants, namely: perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, training, resources, position of the hierarchy and clients’ attitude. We also discuss why several factors were validated quantitatively but not confirmed qualitatively or appeared qualitatively but were not validated quantitatively. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications as well as an agenda for future research