Digital transformation in the public sector: perspectives on organizational change and service delivery

ICT is transforming the public sector. It affects public organizations in the way they are organized and in how they deliver public services. The usage of information technologies in public affairs has been debated over the past two decades. However, nowadays, the potentialities of new technologies ask for a disruption of the status quo, challenging public organizations to develop a new way of conceiving their duties towards the administrated territory. The dynamics and the increased pervasiveness of ICT brought scholars to create and elaborate a new paradigm for understanding transformation in the digital era. This paradigm is labeled as ‘digital transformation’. My dissertation aims at exploring how digital transformation is occurring in public organizations answering the following research question: How digital technologies are triggering a transformation in the way a public body is organized? For doing that, a double perspective has been tackled. On the one hand, the dissertation focuses on how ICT redesigning the existing processes, procedures, and structures for making new digital technologies institutionalized and routinized into the organization. On the other hand, it explores how ICT is changing the way of interacting with final users, moving towards digital communication channels. The dissertation is configured as a collection of 5 papers. The methodological approach is the same for both the investigated perspectives. First, a qualitative study for each perspective was run for exploring the topic, specifically, focus group and case study methodologies (the results of those studies are reported respectively in paper 1 and paper 3); second, quantitative studies, mainly using survey data, enrich and corroborate the results with empirical evidence (paper 2, paper 2.bis and paper 4). The main empirical setting for the analysis is the Italian context, where two surveys were distributed, and the case studies and focus groups were conducted. To ensure a comparative outlook to reinforce the validity of results, one survey was also distributed in the Netherlands. The main unit of analysis is the local government, which in Italy is the type of public organization that delivers services to citizens and firms. Looking at results from the organizational perspective, they show that in the majority of local governments, ICT is exclusively affecting information systems and processes, leaving the social system unchanged (i.e. organizational structure and culture). The same result has been found also for other types of public organizations, like regional or national governments. As enabling factors for pursuing this transformation, the results stress the role of the management and the importance of continuous collaboration with several actors, within and outside the organization. Instead, looking at service delivery transformation, the results show that local governments start opening the digital channel for service delivery from G2B services (generally more digitalized), moving only in a second phase to the digitization of G2C services. Also looking at digital transformation from this perspective, the process in Italy is far from being accomplished. More than one-third of the Italian local governments reach only a low digital maturity level, corresponding to low or null service digitization. Within this perspective, it further emerges that public organizations are beginning to consider and shall indeed consider the possibility of leaving the digital channel as the unique option for accessing a public service, thus rethinking their service delivery strategy. Hence, a new framework for the design of a service delivery strategy has been developed.

L’ICT sta trasformando il settore pubblico. In particolare influenza il modo in cui le pubbliche amministrazioni sono organizzate e come queste erogano i propri servizi. Oggi ancora di più, le potenzialità delle nuove tecnologie chiedono questo tipo di cambiamento, che di recente è stato indicato come ‘digital transformation’. La tesi ambisce a esplorare come le pubbliche amministrazioni stanno affrontando questo processo di trasformazione. In particolare la tesi ambisce a rispondere alla seguente domanda di ricerca: ‘Come le tecnologie stanno spingendo verso una trasformazione del modo in cui una pubblica amministrazione è organizzata?’ Per rispondere a questa domanda la tesi utilizza una doppia prospettiva: in primo luogo va a vedere come l’ICT stia modificando i processi le procedure e le strutture della pubblica amministrazione, in secondo luogo si focalizza su come fare una transizione verso un’erogazione digitale dei servizi pubblici. Complessivamente la tesi si configura come una raccolta di 5 articoli. 2 adottano un approccio qualitativo e 3 un approccio quantitativo. La ricerca è stata svolta nel contesto italiano, con un’unica eccezione relativa a un articolo sviluppato con dati raccolti in Olanda. La principale unità di analisi sono i Comuni. I risultati seguono le due prospettive della tesi. Da un punto di vista interno, i risultati mostrano come l’ICT stia modificando processi e sistemi informativi, lasciando strutture e cultura inalterati. Inoltre emerge con forza il ruolo del manager, la cui azione è il fattore abilitante di maggior peso nel processo di cambiamento. Dal punto di vista invece dell’erogazione dei servizi i risultati mostrano come quasi un terzo dei Comuni italiani non eroga servizi digitali, tra quelli che erogano servizi, quelli più diffusi sono quelli diretti alle imprese. Per spingere verso l’utilizzo dei servizi digitali, i risultati della tesi suggeriscono la possibilità di transitare verso l’obbligo di adozione del canale digitale, almeno per quelle fasce di popolazione che non presentano problemi di accesso al canale.