Barriers and Drivers of Digital Transformation in Public Organizations

Barriers and Drivers of Digital Transformation in Public Organizations: Results from a Survey in the Netherlands

Tangi, Luca (Politecnico di Milano)
Janssen, M.F.W.H.A. (TU Delft Information and Communication Technology)
Benedetti, Michele (Politecnico di Milano)
Noci, Giuliano (Politecnico di Milano)

Viale Pereira, Gabriela (editor)
Janssen, Marijn (editor)
Lee, Habin (editor)
Lindgren, Ida (editor)
Rodríguez Bolívar, Manuel Pedro (editor)
Scholl, Hans Jochen (editor)
Zuiderwijk, Anneke (editor)

2020

The introduction of ICT is requiring public administrations to transform their organizations to take advantage of these technologies. Despite its significance, no studies so far collected quantitative evidence on (i) how and the extent to which this transformation is currently underway and (ii) which drivers and barriers are hindering and leading this transformation process. This article aims at filling this gap by surveying Dutch public administrations. In total, 46 responses from different organizations were collected that provide insight into their transformation efforts. Findings show that digital transformation efforts had only a partial impact at the organizational level: processes, employees’ duties and tasks and information systems are going through a deep transformation, whereas the social system seems to be less affected by the transformation process. Moreover, the analysis results suggest that external drivers are the main motivation for organizational transformation, and that expected internal barriers do not de facto result in digital transformation. These counterintuitive results suggest that in public administrations only exogenous input result in a sense of urgency and that the perceived barriers to transformation can be overcome if there is sufficient external pressure.

Barriers and drivers
E-government
Organizational transformation
Socio-technical theory
Transformational government

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:a1396661-4709-4139-9199-127fc62ee806

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57599-1_4

Springer Science+Business Media

2021-02-24

9783030575984

Electronic Government - 19th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference, EGOV 2020, Proceedings

19th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Government, EGOV 2020, held in conjunction with the IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Participation, ePart 2020, and the International Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government Conference, CeDEM 2020, 2020-08-31 → 2020-09-02, Linkoping, Sweden

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 0302-9743, 12219 LNCS

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2020 Luca Tangi, M.F.W.H.A. Janssen, Michele Benedetti, Giuliano Noci