To understand the current trends and patterns in ICT procurement in the Slovak Republic and to identify areas for improvement, the OECD had conducted a comprehensive spend analysis and stakeholder mapping as well as a stock-taking exercise of the current public procurement policies and practices for the ICT domain.
The data analysed within the Report primarily consists of quantitative data provided from the national e-procurement database by the Public Procurement Office of the Slovak Republic (PPO, UVO) to the OECD. The goal of the comprehensive spend analysis is to understand the main features of current and historic spending in the purchasing category of ICT, including the type of items or services procured, type of procedure used, average amount procured, frequency of purchasing etc. In terms of purchasing categories, the analysis focuses generally on ICT services, but also considers the wider public procurement spend in the Slovak Republic.
The data provided pertains to all evaluated contracts that were announced after the 18th of April 2016 and for which the result of the tender had been published by the 31st of October 2019. All data is derived from the tender award notice, and is evaluated only in relation to the main Common Procurement Vocabulary (CPV) code of the whole contract. The CPV1 codes contained within the analyses are primarily for IT services. Annex A shows the full list of the CPV codes used for the purpose of the report. The list includes the following categories:
IT consulting; internet and support;
IT software-related services;
system and support services;
information technology services;
software support services;
maintenance of information technology software;
software maintenance and repair services;
software programming and consultancy services; and
system and support services.
Where possible, a comparison with the total overall dataset, named total procurement, has been included. This dataset contains the statistics from all published tenders between the same date range from the 18th of April 2016 to the 31st of October 2019. In some instances, the data has been divided into a year upon year analysis. It should be noted that when the data is divided into years, for both 2016 and 2019, the data does not span a full year. Data is rounded to the nearest whole number.
Further information was gathered during two fact-finding missions organised in December 2019 and January 2020. These fact-finding missions included interviews with: the PPO; the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office; the Ministry of Finance; Information Technology Association Slovakia (ITAS); Slovensko Digital; Office of the Mayor of the City of Bratislava; Slovanet; DEUS (DataCentrum elektronizácie územnej samosprávy); the Ministry of Interior; the Anti-Monopoly Office; and Stop Corruption Slovakia.
OECD also conducted a stakeholder mapping exercise to identify the stakeholders involved in this purchasing category, identifying their roles (also in terms of the implementation of the National Digital Agenda of the Slovak Republic) and business processes in place. Finally, OECD collected information, mainly through meetings with different stakeholders during the fact finding missions, but also partially through literature review, on the current public procurement practices in this purchasing category.
Additional data was gathered from other resources, including the Strategy for the Digital Transformation of Slovakia 20302 and the Information and Communication Technology Sector in Slovakia3 issued by the Slovak Investment and Trade Development Agency (SARIO). OECD surveys and reports, including the Government at a Glance 2019 (OECD, 2019[1]), and the Progress on Implementing the 2015 Recommendation on Public Procurement (OECD, 2019[2]) also served as sources.