Abstract: Governments and societies worldwide are turning to smart public governance as a potential solution to address the diverse and complex societal goals, along with the dynamic economic and policy pressures they face. However, there's a notable gap in frameworks designed to measure smart public governance in the realm of social sciences. This paper sets out to bridge that gap by introducing a decision-support model for assessing the maturity of smart public governance. This is achieved on the basis of a systematic literature review of relevant academic articles and a content analysis of policy papers. The smart public governance parameters from these two sources are integrated into a decision support model, thus setting the layout of a multi-attribute decision support model to assess the maturity of smart public governance. To guide our research, we embrace a design science research approach.

Points for Practitioners: In this paper, we introduce a decision-support model for assessing the maturity of smart public governance. By presenting this model, we provide an addition to the ongoing debate on how to measure the maturity of smart public governance. The proposed model offers a structured and comprehensive approach for measuring the maturity of smart public governance that can be adapted to diverse contexts.

Keywords: decision support model; maturity assessment; smart public governance

This study presents a classification of business activities for digital government premised on the context of public administration. It is based on work from the Swedish Agency for Digital Government (Digg) conducted during the Spring of 2021, in conjuncture with Digg’s annual analysis of the progress of digital government in the Swedish government sector. The classification is done in the setting of empirical material stemming from a longitudinal quantitative survey on digital government and includes 159 government agencies. The classification is constructed via deductive reasoning based on a review of past research, international classification standards and government reports. The results display eight different types of business activities in public administration relevant for understanding and analyzing digital government. A business activity is what a government agency, according to law, is responsible for carrying out and can be, for example, to issue certain types of permits, conduct supervisions or to set regulations and standards. The proposed classification is tested via a systematic review of the judicial documents instructing each of the 159 government agencies of their main business activities. Based on the proposed classification, we discuss and argue for how they constitute the modus operandi of public administration in which digital technology is put to practical use. To put the results in a wider context we discuss our results in relationship to two related research areas. Firstly, in relationship to our previous work on how to combine digital government and public administration by focusing more closely on core-business processes. Secondly, to put this topic in an even bigger context, we also discuss how the results is relevant for the potential of horizontal integration of information and processes in government. This study thus contributes with an empirically tested classification of public administration relevant for analyzing digital government by concentrating on the business activities of government agencies and places this classification in the context of research pertaining to questions of integration and interoperability.