Title: Exploring data analytics adoption in public procurement: The case of Norway
Abstract: Procurement analytics is the process of collecting and analyzing procurement data for identifying meaningful insights and aiding in effective business decision-making. The prevalence of large datasets is starting to spread high potentials across the public sector; however, an impediment to its reach and utilization orientates around the low level of data analytics adoption to exploit the full potential of this data availability. In this paper, we explore the adoption of the data science process and data analytics in procurement in the Norwegian public sector through the technology-organization-environment framework. This is achieved by employing descriptive statistics on survey data collected by the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment, which included 343 responses across 136 municipalities, 115 state enterprises, 11 counties, and 81 municipality and state companies. Our descriptive results indicate that the organization context-related factors, such as employee competence in analytics, budget size, and top-management support for data-driven cultures, impact the organization’s adoption of data science and data analytics in public procurement. The technological and environmental contexts (for example, use of digital tools, technology availability, and national policies) have no clear impact on the organization’s adoption of analytics. However, our correlation analysis results show that none of the above-mentioned factors have a correlation with the adoption and use of data analytics in public procurement.