Digital Transformation in the Public Administrations: a Guided Tour For Computer Scientists

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of digital transformation in public administrations, emphasizing the importance of cultural, organizational, and technological shifts, and identifying four key pillars for successful implementation.

Contribution

It introduces a conceptual map of four key pillars—data, ICT, skills, and agile processes—and discusses their interactions to guide computer scientists in understanding public sector digital transformation.

Findings

Data is the most critical pillar of digital transformation.

Successful DT requires cultural, organizational, and technological shifts.

Four key pillars underpin effective digital transformation in the public sector.

Abstract

Digital Transformation (DT) is the process of integrating digital technologies and solutions into the activities of an organization, whether public or private. This paper focuses on the DT of public sector organizations, where the targets of innovative digital solutions are either the citizens or the administrative bodies or both. This paper is a guided tour for Computer Scientists, as the digital transformation of the public sector involves more than just the use of technology. While technological innovation is a crucial component of any digital transformation, it is not sufficient on its own. Instead, DT requires a cultural, organizational, and technological shift in the way public sector organizations operate and relate to their users, creating the capabilities within the organization to take full advantage of any opportunity in the fastest, best, and most innovative manner in the ways they operate and relate to the citizens. Our tutorial is based on the results of a survey that we performed as an analysis of scientific literature available in some digital libraries well known to Computer Scientists. Such tutorial let us to identify four key pillars that sustain a successful DT: (open) data, ICT technologies, digital skills of citizens and public administrators, and agile processes for developing new digital services and products. The tutorial discusses the interaction of these pillars and highlights the importance of data as the first and foremost pillar of any DT. We have developed a conceptual map in the form of a graph model to show some basic relationships among these pillars. We discuss the relationships among the four pillars aiming at avoiding the potential negative bias that may arise from a rendering of DT restricted to technology only. We also provide illustrative examples and highlight relevant trends emerging from the current state of the art.