ABSTRACT
This short memo exposes the enormous opportunities presented by the emergence of Big Data in public procurement and the lack of investment and effort for exploiting these opportunities. Big Data in public procurement holds the promise of fundamentally transforming how procurement performance is understood and it can provide a vastly superior guide to effective policy decisions and implementation compared to our current knowledge. However, Big Data implies large structured and high quality datasets which are typically not available in spite of extensive transparency regulations. Successfully harnessing Big Data also requires valid and easy-to-understand indicators to make sense of the enormous diversity revealed by it. In addition, making Big Data analytics part of daily research and policy-making practice requires new skills and a change of culture (Fazekas, 2014).
