The role of value complexity, structure, and technology in public procurement process performance

The efficiency of a public organizations internal processes is a critical component of organizational effectiveness. However, a perennial tension lies in the simultaneous pursuit of administrative efficiency and other democratic values. We consider these tensions in the context of public procurement--an essential activity of government. Timely procurement processes by government facilitate the provision of public goods and services to the communities they serve. At the same time, government purchasing has large distributional consequences, and many governments have put procurement policies in place to achieve broader social objectives. Given the prominence of government procurement, there is remarkably little research examining factors that affect the performance of the procurement process. This paper builds a preliminary framework to examine how an organization's competing policy priorities, size and structure, and purchasing technology and infrastructure, affect the duration of time required for the approval of purchase requests. We analyze the data utilizing a unique set of survey data. Our analyses of a representative set of more than 200 local governments demonstrate that all three sets of variables in our framework can affect approval times, they do so in nuanced ways based on the types of purchases being made. We conclude with a discussion of the next steps for this work.