Procurement Governance Innovation Failure Patterns in U.S. State Enterprise Systems: A Cross-Jurisdictional Taxonomy and Capability-Gap Mapping Framework (2014–2024)

Abstract

U.S. state governments have spent heavily on enterprise procurement systems. These systems were built to enforce compliance, strengthen oversight, and create reliable audit trails across complex multi-agency environments. Despite this investment, state oversight reports keep documenting the same procurement failures — in the same digitally enabled settings — year after year. This suggests that having capable systems does not automatically produce capable governance. This paper analyzes eight verified state oversight reports from seven U.S. states over the period 2014 through 2024. Using qualitative comparative document analysis, the study develops a seven-domain procurement-control failure taxonomy. Each domain is mapped to the enterprise governance capability area it reflects. Governance architecture, monitoring, workflow enforcement, and organizational capability failures appeared more consistently across jurisdictions than technical system defects. The largest capability gap — present across all seven states — was organizational governance maturity: the distance between what a system can do and what an organization actually configures, maintains, and enforces. The paper offers a portable, audit-grounded diagnostic framework for EIS practitioners working on the design, assessment, or remediation of procurement governance systems in regulated environment