A brief introduction to digital government

Eddie Copeland

Digital government is both something and nothing. It is something because there’s no denying that people use the phrase and think they mean something by it. Digital technologies are a distinctive driver of change in modern societies and economies and they make things possible that would be otherwise harder or not feasible at all. Filing cabinet government. carbon paper government and even mainframe government are all very clearly different from digital government. And yet digital government is nothing. Precisely because digital is everything, calling something digital doesn’t add much to understanding, but draws attention to the technology, which is simultaneously vitally important and not the thing which really matters.

But given that the phrase is not going to go away, some clear-headed thinking about what we should understand by it and how we should apply is highly desirable. And that is precisely what this paper offers. It’s a draft open to public comment, so very much still evolving, but it’s already a useful overview. It neatly and successfully avoids the traps of equating digital with technology and digital uniquely with service design, but is slightly less successful in avoiding the suggestion that digital is done by digital teams.

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