The paradox of experience: Public procurement and delivery timelines across digital solution types

Lengthy public procurement processes can slow the delivery of essential public services. While most research on procurement duration has focused on infrastructure and public works, digital solutions now play a central role in how public services are delivered. This study uses survival analysis to examine the time required to award contracts, execute them, and report project delivery, drawing on 40,991 digitalization projects carried out by 7838 Italian municipalities under the Next Generation EU program. We proxy experience in procuring digital solutions with historical procurement expenditure and show that its relationship with project duration varies by solution type. Higher prior activity is associated with faster timelines for standardized connections to centrally managed platforms, but with slower timelines for cloud migration and citizen experience projects, where implementation requires more local configuration. Results for interoperability projects are inconclusive. At the median, interquartile increases in prior activity span about 118 days between citizen experience and digital notice projects, or about 22% of median completion duration. These findings challenge the common assumption that procurement experience necessarily speeds up project delivery. Prior activity may reflect both reusable organizational routines and the installed base created by earlier projects, although our data do not directly measure either mechanism. Historical procurement expenditure on digital solutions should therefore not be treated as a general indicator of readiness. Program managers should consider solution category when assessing readiness and setting or monitoring timelines.