E-governance as a strategic lever for strengthening public procurement transparency : A step-by-step Fuzzy AHP logic

This paper adopts the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (Fuzzy AHP) to identify electronic governance (e-governance) key attributes that enhance public procurement transparency. To this end, interviews were conducted with three decision-makers having sufficient knowledge and expertise in the field. The results highlight the existence of one dominant factor: process transparency; three secondary factors (digital interoperability, electronic procurement platforms, and sustainable development); four third-order factors (accountability, open data culture, smart contracts, and information technology audits); and three factors (information and communication technologies infrastructure, user-centered perspective, and electronic record management) that experts judged to be less significant in the context of our study. Hence, the contribution of this paper is threefold. Firstly, it provides an overview of the relationship between e-governance and public procurement, an area with a notable gap in the management literature. Secondly, it uses the Fuzzy AHP logic with a simple step-by-step guide, allowing researchers to understand and implement this approach in various fields. Thirdly, it provides a hierarchy of decision-making factors, as well as verification of the model via consistency tests. However, drawing factors exclusively from the literature review suggests that a preliminary field study could have identified other relevant variables, thus offering a lead for more in-depth future research.