In the era of rapid and significant digital disruptions, governments continue to undertake reforms to adapt, manage and embrace the digital transformation. These reforms reflect the paradigm shift from e-government to digital government: this shift represents a transition from using technology to support more efficient public sector operations, to a strategic decision-making approach. This approach entails integration of digital technologies sustained by overarching, coherent strategies for the whole public sector that is aligned with broader reform and modernisation agendas. This aims to support the design and delivery of more effective and inclusive public policies and services that can respond swiftly to citizens’ changing expectations. An integrated and sustainable implementation of digital government policies can only be done based on an effective governance framework, which enables secure policy leadership and coordination across different sectors and levels of government.
Having a national digital government strategy (NDGS) constitutes a key element in achieving this end. In particular, a national strategy helps not only in clarifying and establishing common understanding of the objectives, their subsequent actions, roles and responsibilities of the involved actors, but also demonstrates political leadership and commitment. Except for Bosnia and Herzegovina, all Western Balkans have developed NDGS. The NDGS found in the region is often integrated as a part of the national digital agenda strategy, or of the public administration reform strategy focusing on adoption of ICT tools to improve public service delivery. In the case of OECD countries, all except Sweden indicated that they have developed an NDGS. While having one does not always translate into its effective implementation, it reflects governments’ on-going efforts and their coordinated willingness to harness the digital transformation into the modernisation reforms of the public sector in ways to support coherent decisions across the whole public sector.
An effective governance framework furthermore requires institutional models that are in line with the digital government policy objectives. In particular, their roles and responsibilities should be clearly defined and examined according to the changing environments, new technological trends and the strategic priorities. In this sense, having a public sector organisation with the role of leading and coordinating the digital government policies could greatly support a coherent and effective institutional framework. In fact, all OECD countries and Western Balkans have reported to have such body (-ies) in place, and have assigned them various responsibilities. Among these bodies in the Western Balkan region, advisory responsibilities (soft policy levers) – such as coordinating the development of the NDGS, monitoring its implementation, and developing technical guidelines for the development of ICT architecture – are more frequent than decision-making responsibilities (hard policy levers). More specifically, the responsibilities of these bodies in the Western Balkan region only sometimes extend to prioritising ICT project investments (50%), carrying out ex-ante revisions and evaluation of ICT projects (50%), and even less frequently to approving ICT projects across the government (33%), and providing financial support for the development and implementation of ICT projects (0%). In comparison, this is often the case in OECD countries (68%, 79%, 68% and 50%, respectively). Effective and strategic use of such hard policy levers could have significant impacts on implementation of digital transformation strategies especially by avoiding fragmentation and enhancing coherence of ICT projects across the public sector.
Another key enabler of successful digital transformation is to ensure coherence and maximise synergies between projects and initiatives also through technical coordination across different levels and sectors of government. OECD countries (68%), including those that are also in the EU (63%), have in place a formal coordination mechanism that is responsible for government IT projects at the central level – such as through meetings of the Council of Chief Information Officers. This type of mechanism exists in three Western Balkan governments. Notably, this role is carried out by the National Agency for Information Society in Albania, the National Council for ICT in North Macedonia, and eGovernment Coordination Council in Serbia.
