GovTech is the collaboration between the public sector and start-ups, innovators, government “intrapreneurs”, and academia on innovative digital government solutions. It complements existing public sector capability for agile, user-centric, responsive, and cost-effective processes and services. It aims to contribute to an agile public sector and enhance digital government maturity.
The results of the 2023 OECD Digital Government Index (DGI) show that GovTech is becoming a widespread practice as an enabler of digital transformation and a valuable practice to help solve policy challenges. Of the 33 OECD Members that participated in the DGI:
70% have already implemented digital strategies for collaboration with the GovTech ecosystem.
55% are using GovTech to foster innovation, a culture of experimentation, and collaboration.
42% are using GovTech to facilitate the testing and adoption of technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI).
GovTech reflects the need for collaborative governance in digital government. It creates space for strategic partnerships between the public and other sectors to co-create innovative digital solutions. By fostering the participation of start-ups and small-to-medium enterprises, it also helps address the issue of embedded legacy ICT vendors across government.
GovTech collaborations enable digital government by allowing public sectors to explore, experiment, and develop digital solutions that address key challenges that the sector faces. It is used to:
ensure that digital government investments are cost-effective and deliver their intended outcomes.
offer scalable and replicable solutions, expanding options for public sectors with limited resources.
explore digital technologies, especially for the development and deployment of AI-based solutions.
develop solutions that better meet user needs for more people-centred public services.
enhance capability and capacity to address key policy challenges, like the green transition.
However, despite the value that countries see in GovTech, there are varying levels of maturity in its implementation, with fewer countries having dedicated GovTech strategies or programmes, teams to manage projects, or the resources to support them. The average level of GovTech maturity across OECD Members is at 50%, dropping to 14% amongst OECD accession candidate countries.
Many countries do not make sufficient resources available to ensure that their use of GovTech is effective and impactful. As outlined in the DGI, only 40% have dedicated funding for GovTech collaborations, 27% have training programmes, and only 24% have dedicated procurement mechanisms to facilitate GovTech partnerships. More broadly, most countries are also lacking some of the key underlying digital public infrastructure to enable the development and scaling of GovTech solutions, including digital service standards (24%), common framework for interoperability (27%), common infrastructure for API management (24%), or shared cloud infrastructure (18%).
These data show that countries require further support in identifying the key enabling conditions to implement GovTech effectively and leverage its full potential.
To this end, this paper presents the OECD’s definition of GovTech (Chapter 2) and sets out the GovTech Policy Framework (Chapter 3). The framework is designed to guide governments on how to establish the conditions for successful, sustainable, and effective GovTech.
The framework consists of two parts: the GovTech Building Blocks and the GovTech Enablers. The building blocks (Chapter 3) represent the foundations at the micro-level needed to establish impactful GovTech practices within public sectors by introducing more agile practices, mitigating risks, and building meaningful collaboration with the GovTech ecosystem. These building blocks include:
Mature digital government infrastructure: including the necessary technology, infrastructure, tools, and data governance to enable both GovTech collaborations and the digital solutions they develop.
Capacities for collaboration and experimentation: within the public sector, including the digital skills and multidisciplinary teams; agile processes, tools, and methodologies; and a culture that encourages experimentation and accepts failure.
Resources and implementation support: considering how to make funding available, how to evolve procurement approaches, and how to scale successful pilots across organisations and internationally.
Availability and maturity of GovTech partners: including acceleration programmes to support start-ups growth by facilitating access to capital, the scaling up of solutions, and minimising barriers to access procurement opportunities.
At the macro-level, the enablers (Chapter 4) instead create an environment that fosters the development of GovTech and facilitates good practices. This is done at the:
Strategic layer: where governments could use GovTech strategies and champions in senior leadership positions to mobilise support and set a clear direction for GovTech.
Institutional layer: where governments could seek collaboration and knowledge-sharing across institutions at the national, regional, or policy levels.
Network layer: where both governments and GovTech actors should seek to mobilise the network collectively to strengthen the GovTech practice and garner broader support from communities.
However, countries still require guidance on when GovTech collaborations are most useful. The GovTech Decision Tree (Chapter 5) guides policymakers or practitioners on how to assess when GovTech is most effective and would have the greatest impact; that is, where both the problem and potential solutions are clearly defined, or where the problem is well-defined and the scenario is replicable, but the solutions are unknown.
By using the OECD GovTech Policy Framework as a guide, governments can more confidently use GovTech partnerships as part of their digital government strategies and maximise the impact of their collaborations. However, while not all these components need to be in place immediately, Governments can focus on specific components of the framework in the short term to introduce greater innovation and agility to the public sector, while building a scalable approach to secure sustainable outcomes and greater impact in the longer term.