All governments are being subdued to budgetary restrictions, to make more with less and the society is demanding for more transparency, justice and equity in the public contracts. Technology is more and more present, offering a wider range of products with environmental concern. All governmental effort for the quality improvement of current expenditures with assets and services used in the public sector must go through the modernization of the supply chain management. In most cases this effort is reduced to part of the process, such as the procurement systems. It is shown that there is a huge modernization potential in other stages of the logistic process, as the inventory management, standardizing engineering and specification of assets and services, contracts and suppliers' management. This is relevant for the public administration, because the expenditures with purchase of assets and services may represent up to 36% of the budget of government unities. This way, it is up to the public power to develop techniques or to adapt them from the private initiative and incorporate them to the public administration for the increasing of efficiency and capacity of those expenditures. The research in Brazil in this public administration area are deficient and require efforts from researchers to solve doubts still persistent, such as the reasons for the low use of the electronic commerce, the difficulties for the suppliers to participate more intensively in the process and the techniques of supply chain management adapted to the public sector. Our research has identified that the public expenditures management in Brazil must be treated in all stages of assets and services supply chain, as the intensive use of electronic commerce, that is, since the survey for the needs to the final use, with integrated systems. The great majority of government unities in Brazil is not using appropriate techniques for planning the material and services needs aligned with strategic plan, suppliers development, virtual process, inventory management, relevant expenditures management and other important one - inside an integrative view, as much internal as external, to minimize operational costs of transactions - , the reach of expenditures reduction goals, improvement of investment capacity and maximization of essential services to the population.
information technology; electronic government; supply chain management for the public sector