Abstract
In developing countries, the importance of digital transformation in the public sector as the engine room of every Government cannot be over-emphasized. Information and Communication Technology (ICT), if its integration into development reforms is gotten right, will play a revolutionary role for developing countries to accelerate their advancements while enabling possibilities of competing with top nations for social and economic growth.
However, achieving digital transformation objectives is no bed of roses. A holistic approach with a strong foundation involving a whole lot of activities that must be put in place and executed. Most of the digital transformation projects had resulted in failures without achieving initial anticipated value. Therefore, Governments must rethink their approaches and also ensure the digital transformation is holistic and end-to-end.
One of the holistic approaches to digital transformation is to continuously assess and measure the performance of public institutions (PIs) to ensure benefits are realized as they spend huge amounts of public resources in digital projects. However, there is an inadequacy of a tailored and comprehensive performance assessment framework in the form of a toolkit that can be used by IT/ICT regulators and the PIs themselves to assess post-digital transformation projects implementation of developing countries. A holistic assessment toolkit that provides regulators and PIs means of assessing digital transformation maturity will help to improve benefits realization for IT investments and ultimately enhance the contribution of digital transformation projects to social-economic development of developing countries.
This paper presents a holistic framework for digital transformation performance assessment by describing four digital transformation stages each with its defining characteristics, nine key assessment parameters, alignment of each parameter with the four stages to aid a better understanding of what should be achieved in each stage as public institutions move from one maturity stage to the next. It finally provides an assessment questionnaire template to assist public institutions and certified digital transformation maturity assessors in carrying out digital government transformation performance assessments.