The article aims to investigate the issue of public value assessment at the intersection between the research areas focused on digital transformation, public service management, accounting and accountability, in the empirical context of Italian state museums.

In fact, digital technologies are increasingly being implemented in public sector organizations, modifying how public services are delivered (Agostino, Bracci, & Steccolini, 2022). These developments can significantly affect state institutions’ accounting and accountability (Grossi, et al., 2023), whose multifaceted nature (Bovens, Schillemans, & Goodin, 2014; Sinclair, 1995) encourages new research endeavors concerning the implications of digital transformation on public performance (Agostino, Saliterer, & Steccolini, 2022).

However, although digital transformation has sparked the interest of researchers about the impact of technological innovations on public organizations’ processes and practices (van Noordt C. M., 2019; Brunet, Motamedi, Guénette, & Forgues, 2019), the effect of these phenomena on accounting and accountability has received far less attention (Agostino, Saliterer, & Steccolini, 2022). Moreover, where the topic is studied, researchers tend to evaluate the effects of digital innovations on public performance primarily in terms of effectiveness and efficiency in service delivery (Charalabidis & Loukis, 2012; Datta, Walker, & Amarilli, 2020), although it has been recognized that the performance of such institutions should be assessed more broadly based on how they contribute to public value, rather than just on the basis of profit and loss (Moore M. H., 1995; Grossi, Vakkuri, & Sargiacomo, 2022). This probably relates to the fact that the concept of “public value” has always been perceived as blurred and roughly defined (Prebble, 2012), limiting the empirical investigations about the topic (Williams & Shearer, 2011) and, consequently, the attempts to build a unified framework for assessing it (Faulkner & Kaufman, 2017).

Consequently, this research aims at bridging the relationship between public service delivery, digital transformation, and performance evaluation by investigating the assessment of the public value enhanced by digital transformation in public service organizations. To do so, this project will refer to the empirical context of Italian public museums in order to answer the following research questions:

RQ1: What are the dimensions of the enhancement of public value by digital transformation in public service delivery?

RQ2: How can these dimensions be assessed?

The research design includes answering the aforementioned questions through the building of a public value assessment framework for digital transformation in the public sector. To do so, the study implements a two-phase methodology that involves the theoretical construction of the framework and its empirical testing in the context of Italian public museums. Thus, the first phase consists of a framework building relying on a scoping literature review (Arksey & O’Malley, 2005) concerning extant theories identifying public value’s dimensions and assessment methods, with a specific focus on the context of cultural organizations. The second phase involves the testing of the framework on Italian state museums, collecting data through interviews with museums’ directors and staff involved in the implementation of these entities’ digital strategies. The appropriateness of this empirical context is explained as follows.

Museums in Italy are predominantly public entities (Istat, 2013), almost entirely financed by contributions from the government (Fedeli & Santoni, 2006), which supports them in preserving and valorizing cultural heritage (Lorusso, Cogo, & Natali, 2016). If the conservation purpose has always been the predominant reason behind these institutions’ foundation (Fedeli & Santoni, 2006), the focus of museums is shifting towards fostering the involvement of a differentiated range of visitors, including minorities, people with disabilities and, in general, the side of the public that has always conceived museums as an elitarian space (González-Herrera, Díaz-Herrera, Hernández-Dionis, & Pérez-Jorge, 2023). Consequently, scholars have tried to build models associating traditional financial indicators with new measures to include the additional value produced by these entities in their performance measurement systems (Gilhespy, 1999; Turbide & Laurin, 2009; Weinstein & Bukovinsky, 2009). However, arts management research has been so far unable to propose a comprehensive theoretical framework for performance measurement able to include all these different aspects (Chiaravalloti, 2014). Building an assessment framework for public value for these organizations could represent the opportunity to allow the recording and reporting of this additional value, both at the specific level of the cultural sector and at the more general level of public service delivery.

The hypothesis at the basis of this research is that the way public value is produced by digital transformation in state museums could be representative of the modalities through which this production happens in the more extended context of public service organizations as a whole. Consequently, the first expected finding would be to identify at least a certain number of dimensions of public value that could be more extensively generalized to other types of public service organizations. However, it is nonetheless expected that some dimensions of public value would need to be brought back to the specific empirical context where this value is produced. Thus, the challenge the author could encounter would be to develop a framework able of combining a certain degree of generalizability with the need for a certain level of specificity. The solution to this problem could be to associate in the same framework measures that assess more general dimensions of public value with more empirically specific measures, being aware that research considering to apply this model to another public service delivery sector would have to reinterpret it to a certain extent, at least for what concerns its most context-related aspects.