Tracing GovTech in European public procurement
Which public administrations in the EU procure GovTech products the most? What are they used for? And who supplies them? These are questions we asked ourselves — and found answers by systematically screening European public procurement data. In this article, we share our insights.
Rich in details and yet sparsely explored, public procurement data can help us answer some compelling questions — and considering that European public procurement accounts for 14 percent of GDP in the European Union, the answers to those questions matter.
Here at GovMind, we systematically investigated procurement data to track where GovTech (short for: government technology, see our definition in this article) has been procured, so we can further support its adoption by public administrations across Europe.
By finding existing success cases for procuring GovTech, we hope to derive underlying patterns and make them transparent to government agencies trying to do similar work. At the same time, we want to realistically assess how much of GovTech’s potential is indeed being used and where further opportunities can be exploited.
TED: the not-so-open open data platform
At a first glance, the Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) platform appears to be a promising source for easily acquiring data on public procurement in the European Union. The online portal is a supplement to the Official Journal of the EU and contains data on procurement notices from all 27 EU countries, plus countries from the European Economic Area and more.
All public tenders with values equal to or exceeding pre-defined thresholds have to be published on the TED platform; and importantly for our analysis, for every tender there is also an award notice that names the supplier that has won a tender in the past.
For the tech-savvy amongst us: TED provides an Application Programming Interface (API) and bulk downloads of Extensible Markup Language (XML) files, which should facilitate the job for anyone interested in examining its data. The way that TED open data is structured, however, makes it a daunting task for those looking to inspect it in scale.
As proof, a number of initiatives are trying to democratise access to TED and procurement data in general, such as the Opentender portal. Together with the Open Contracting Partnership, they make TED and other procurement data available in an easy-to-analyse format.
The existence of such alternative ways to make use of data that should be easily accessible shows that there is still a long way to go for open data development in Europe. Nonetheless, it also displays demand for the usage of such data.
How we traced GovTech in the procurement data
To trace back GovTech products and services in public procurement, we made use of GovMind’s comprehensive data core that lists almost 2,000 European GovTech providers.
By matching the names of those GovTech providers from our data core with suppliers in the award notices of the TED data, we were able to build a database with GovTech specific procurement. It contains details on public buyers, GovTech providers and content of each tender, such as date, description, value and category of product or service.
As with any task involving open data, this matching process does not come without its challenges: for example, the same supplier can be listed with name variations and even with distinct unique identifiers in the TED data, making it difficult to place some of the matches. In addition, the TED data is not complete for every award notice, which limits the final outcome of our analysis.
Be that as it may, tracing GovTech in public procurement proved to be a valuable effort, as the following findings show. This was made possible by using data provided in the Opentender portal. We would like to thank them for their great work and mission to democratise procurement data in Europe.
Let the data talk
The results of our matching exercise gave us 807 tender award notices between 2010 and the beginning of 2021. That can be attributed to 223 GovTech providers. We then analysed the characteristics of these tender awards, such as date, value, product or service classification, location and buyer.
See here the main initial insights we can get out of this:
Further, we had a closer look at the GovTech providers we were able to spot. We sorted them by when they were founded, where they were from and in which thematic areas their solutions were implemented. These are the results of our analysis:
What’s next?
As we can see, the first exploration of GovTech products and services in public procurement produced interesting insights. However, this is just the beginning: as TED data only includes award notices for tenders above significant value thresholds, a far bigger volume of tenders occurs below those thresholds.
As a next step, we will start exploring this below the threshold data, made available through multiple sources. In this way, we hope to paint a more complete picture of the use of GovTech in public procurement. This should help to identify patterns for successful use of GovTech, allowing it to replicate the procurement of such innovative GovTech solutions in the future.
We are happy to receive your opinions and suggestions on this article, for example via LinkedIn, via Twitter or by email (contact@govmind.tech).
GovMind is a young technology company headquartered in Berlin that systematically collects, analyses and interprets information on GovTech solutions. On this basis, we develop scalable knowledge products. Since our founding in 2020, we have been bringing innovative solutions into use by states and public administrations.
