Conference Agenda

The EU and its framework for the Digital Decade contain a “digital compass” defined by 4 dimensions. One of these is the digital skills dimension, which includes the digital skills defined in the DigComp framework. Only two European countries (the Netherlands and Finland) have more than 80% of the population with at least basic digital skills, but all other EU countries are still far from the EU’s target of having at least 80% of the population with at least basic digital skills by 2030. And Slovenia is one of these countries where only 46.7% of citizens will have at least basic digital skills by 2024. This means that there is not much time left to reach this target by 2030. And the question is, how can this be achieved?

We have used data from the EU survey on the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in households and by individuals provided by EUROSTAT. We conducted a latent profile analysis (LPA) of 2585 responses to determine the detailed current state of all five dimensions of digital skills in the Slovenian population. Using covariates such as age group and income class, we were able to identify differences between different groups in terms of digital skills. A five-cluster solution proved to be optimal, where users were categorised into the following groups: highly skilled, skilled but overconfident, semi-skilled with low digital content creation skills, semi-skilled with low digital content creation skills and overconfident and low skilled. The results of the LPA analysis with covariates show that the probability of being in the low-skilled cluster increases with age, while income does not influence this probability. On the other hand, the probability of belonging to the “semi-skilled with low digital creation skills and too much trust in internet content” cluster is higher for younger groups and low-income groups.

The results of our research can help policy makers in Slovenia to better plan future steps to improve the digital skills of the population by applying different strategies for different age or income groups. If other European countries utilise the same research, similar steps can be taken to achieve the EU's overall goals.

The concept of “super-apps” is reshaping digital service delivery by consolidating multiple services under a single platform. Initially pioneered by Asian companies through applications like WeChat, Grab, and Gojek, super-apps have demonstrated high efficiency in integrating together different services such as digital payments, delivery and communication. Their key attributes include a unified user ecosystem, embedded financial services and also the ability to integrate third-party solutions.

Ukraine has the potential to lead the implementation of super-apps in public administration and digital governance. There are three main components, which can be a base for a super-app evolution. Firstly, it’s “Diia”, the government’s digital services platform, which represents the most advanced model in the public sector, offering services like digital ID management and online payments of fines and taxes. Although not yet a fully developed super-app, “Diia” already provides a solid foundation for future integration of additional public services. Secondly, in the private sector, Kyivstar, Ukraine’s leading telecommunications company, is strategically expanding its ecosystem by acquiring digital services such as the healthcare platform “Helsi”, online pharmacy “Tabletki.ua”, and taxi service “Uklon”. These acquisitions position Kyivstar as a potential pioneer in developing Ukraine’s first private-sector super-app, collecting under their umbrella such services as communication, transportation and healthcare. This has significant intersections with public services, creating opportunities for further collaboration. Thirdly, Ukraine has emerged as a leader in digital banking, with institutions like PrivatBank and Monobank advancing the neobank model. The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has adopted an open banking concept as a long-term strategy. Based on this concept, bank clients should obtain the possibility to manage multiple accounts and services from different banks through a single third-party application. This initiative could pave the way for a financial super-app, allowing seamless access to banking services from different institutions via a unified digital interface.

With its robust digital infrastructure and ongoing innovations in public and private services, Ukraine is well-positioned to become a European leader in super-app adoption. However, challenges related to cybersecurity, regulatory compliance and potential deeper governance implementations, such as e-voting, remain key topics for further discussion. The successful integration of super-apps into Ukraine’s public administration could set a precedent for digital transformation on a global scale.

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”

Edward O. Wilson

The history of e-government has, paradoxically, been marked by excessive optimism about, and failures to anticipate or predict accurately the effects of, new technology on public administration. The former we experience in advance; the latter in retrospect.

However, for at least two reasons, trying to anticipate the impact of AI on public administration has a different imperative than that for earlier technologies.

The first is the sheer scale/capacity of its potential to eliminate humans and human decision-making from much of the core process of public governance. This is already happening in what might be called the foothills of public administration where the street level bureaucrats have traditionally held sway. It is now percolating upwards into higher and broader parts of the public sphere and in particular into high level decision-making and the generation of the information on which high-level decisions are based.

The second is that this time, the techno-optimism is accompanied by a wave of techno-pessimism, dystopian views of that range from abuse of AI by powerful actors to, at the extreme, a displacement of humans completely by what will, if we get to Artificial Super Intelligence, arguably be a superior life form. There is a real risk that the speed of AI development will overwhelm our ability to put in place guardrails to protect societies and individuals against such possibilities. The same is true of public administration. At the AI conference in Paris in February 2025 the USA and the UK refused to sign a declaration that steps should be taken to ensure that AI was “safe, secure and trustworthy” (Financial Times, 11th February 2025). It would appear that the race to develop AI may result in countries throwing caution to the winds in the race to get there first - a prospect that should alarm anybody concerned with governance in our society.

Drawing on decision theory and the ideas of John Searle and others, this paper is a form of thought experiment. It will seek to explore the possible impacts of AI on the very essence of public governance and what the reaction(s) of the public to such a change might be. It is an exploration that will incorporate, but will go beyond, the questions of trust, ethics, reliability, security, accountability and control that are already the subject of much debate, proposals and fear and seek to address the two questions:

Whether it will be possible to retain traditional and critical features of public administration in this brave new world? and

Whether, without an holistic vision of what we want from public administration, we are condemned to be swept along by technology and politically and economically driven imperatives that take us when we may not want to go?

There is an emerging set of thinking in the UK and beyond which seeks to foreground more relational approaches to the organisation of public administration and delivery of public services in the face of a wider acceptance that the current dominant orthodoxies are failing to deliver the necessary responses to complex needs. Such a ‘relational turn’ in the ways we administer public management potentially needs a rethink of the ways in which we consider issues of data, information and systems in in a highly informated environment. Interest in Relational Public Services (RPS) and Management has been an emerging strand of interest in public administration in what has been described as a relational ‘turn’ in public administration (Bartels & Turnbull, 2018, Wilson et al., 2024, Bartels et al 2024). RPS emphasises the need to work with communities to improve the relevance and impact of proposed programmes and build capacities of local assets. Significant policy trajectories are in the midst of being shaped, demanding government and public service to be built around human rather than structural transactional relationships (Cottam 2018), local and community-based rather than distant and centralised (Lent and Studdert 2019), foregrounding the role of generalists rather than specialists (Needham and Mangan 2014), engaging in co-productive and co-creative approaches with stakeholders instead of paternalistic and bureaucratic approaches (Bartels, 2022, Baines et al 2024), capable of harnessing complexity rather than acting as if it is possible to simplify (Lowe et al. 2022), RPS suggests that NPM's emphasis on transactional approaches to 'markets, managers and measurement' have had significant effects on the ways public services are funded, designed and conditioned (Lowe and Wilson 2017, Lapsey 2024, Wilson et al 2024, Wilson et al 2025).Correspondingly the structures to operate the transactions required to make the systems ‘work’ are deeply inscribed in public service logics (Osborne, 2020) and has driven a response which foregrounds technocratic solutions (French et al., 2023; Wilson et al., 2024; Lapsley & Miller, 2024) to meet what Jamieson et al (2020) described as the need for IS to respond to the “sociotechnical challenges of complex contexts which would allow such systems to move on from the current failure modes enshrined in NPM processes. This paper sets out the case for a new form of platform for public services to respond to the need for tooling the emerging field of relational public administration which draws together a range of perspectives and approaches to analyse the platform currently being deployed in the case study of the Changing Futures programme working with citizens with multiple complex needs using McLoughlin and Wilson's (2013) sociotechnical digital government (3D) framework to analyse a new platform aimed at improving the lives of people with multiple complex needs.

Digitalization has become a defining force in public administration, yet public sector digitalization initiatives frequently fail despite considerable investments and efforts (Filgueiras & Almeida, 2021; Goh & Arenas, 2020; Torfing et al., 2020). While many potential failure factors have been explored, recent research suggests that governance plays a critical role in shaping the outcomes of these initiatives (Almeida et al., 2019; Kiselev et al., 2020; Veeneman et al., 2017). However, the relationship between governance and the outcomes of public sector digitalization initiatives remains underexplored, with limited and often conflicting empirical evidence. This study examines traditional governance modes - hierarchical, market, and networked - alongside emerging tentative governance modes like agile governance. It also explores the interplay of multiple modes within hybrid governance. This study aims to address this gap by investigating how do different governance modes affect the outcomes of digitalization initiatives?

To achieve this, we conduct a multiple case study analyzing sixteen digitalization initiatives across eight public sector organizations in Switzerland. Our case selection follows theoretical and polar sampling techniques, ensuring variation in governance settings and initiative outcomes (Eisenhardt, 2021; Langley & Abdallah, 2011). By comparing successful and failed initiatives within each organization, we isolate governance-related factors affecting performance while controlling for contextual influences.

The study relies on original semi-structured interviews with key governance actors (initiative commissioners, project committees, program and project leaders, examination authorities) and an extensive review of confidential and public documents (project agreements, stakeholder maps, management plans, reports, etc.). By incorporating multiple perspectives, including public sector stakeholders, private partners, and civil society actors, we enhance the validity and credibility of our findings while mitigating self-reporting bias (Langley & Abdallah, 2011).

This empirical research contributes to public administration literature by offering an empirically grounded theoretical model of governance in digitalization initiatives. By exploring the interplay of governance modes and their hybridization, this study provides insights into governance settings conducive to digital transformation in the public sector.

Almeida, V., Filgueiras, F., & Gaetani, F. (2019). Principles and elements of governance of digital public services. IEEE Internet Computing, 23(6), 48–53. https://doi.org/10.1109/MIC.2019.2936928

Eisenhardt, K. M. (2021). What is the Eisenhardt Method, really? Strategic Organization, 19(1), 147–160. https://doi.org/10.1177/1476127020982866

Filgueiras, F., & Almeida, V. (2021). Governance for Digital Technologies. In Governance for the Digital World (pp. 75–104). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55248-0_4

Goh, J. M., & Arenas, A. E. (2020). IT value creation in public sector: how IT-enabled capabilities mitigate tradeoffs in public organisations. European Journal of Information Systems, 29(1), 25–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/0960085X.2019.1708821

Kiselev, C., Winter, R., & Rohner, P. (2020). Project success requires context-aware governance. MIS Quarterly Executive, 19(3), 199–211. https://doi.org/10.17705/2msqe.00033

Langley, A., & Abdallah, C. (2011). Templates and turns in qualitative studies of strategy and management. Research Methodology in Strategy and Management, 6, 201–235. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-8387(2011)0000006007

Torfing, J., Bøgh Andersen, L., Greve, C., & Klausen, K. (2020). Public Governance Paradigms: Competing and Co-Existing Policy, Administrative and Institutional Change series. Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788971225

Veeneman, W., Hirschhorn, F., Klievink, B., Steenhuisen, B., & van der Voort, H. (2017). Petra Governance Handbook-WP7–Governance structures & business models: D7. 3: Governance Handbook.

The ongoing digitalization of Norwegian labor and welfare services has reshaped how residents access, use, and benefit from essential public services. While digitalization offers opportunities for increased efficiency, responsiveness, and accessibility, it risks reproducing or generating new forms of inequality through digital administrative burdens. Drawing from literature on administrative burdens and digital divides scholarship, this paper explores how administrative burdens in digitalized work and welfare services are experienced and navigated by users, and how these processes are shaped by socio-digital inequalities. Our empirical analyses rest on qualitative data including: interviews with 13 street-level bureaucrats (caseworkers in the Norwegian welfare administration (Nav), advisors in other public services), and interviews with 17 young adults with migrant backgrounds who are neither in work nor in education. We find that digital administrative burdens are interconnected, but unevenly experienced across the young people. Even with access, youth struggle to understand information online and from self-service options (learning costs), while demands for digital documentation and reporting (compliance costs) generate frustration. Frustration, stress and shame (psychological costs) can lead to some abandoning services entirely, with potential negative consequences. Navigation strategies, such as using translators or ChatGPT, leveraging formal and informal supports, or channel switching can reduce but also shift burdens, and there are disparities across the youth in leveraging these strategies. Bureaucratic competence appears to be an important precondition for beneficial outcomes but is interwoven with technical skills and others individual factors. By studying these dynamics, the paper contributes to the broader literature on e-government and digital inclusion, and how digitalized welfare services could be made more inclusive for vulnerable populations.