ABSTRACT
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 the current knowledge. What fundamentally reconfigures our capacity to understand and govern public procurement systems is the move from reviewing individual records to analyzing a structured database. Big Data in public procurement drastically reduces the cost of obtaining information for the kinds of analyses which were possible without such data. In spite of the obvious informational needs and wide-ranging benefits, making the move to a data-rich approach has proven to be surprisingly challenging with some governments and international organizations even decreasing their 'Big Data readiness' rather than improving it. Big Data is a term describing the large amount of data that inundates a business on a day-to-day basis. Transparency of bidding and contract implementation is generally welcome, but it may well also produce adverse consequences.
