C-suite Leadership of Digital Government

During the infant days of the e-government era, the business process reengineering wave swept through the management vocabulary with strength similar to the waves of disruption [1–3]. Managers were supposed to play a key role in leading the change [4, 5] and managerial actions in the right form and dose could help overcome organizational barriers for transformation [6].

The optimistic tone on government transformation was echoed in the waves of digital era governance with the focus of the transformation potential related to the use of the internet and the emerging digital X era with IoT, blockchain, robots, and AI as the apparent potent radical transformative boosters. In the classic article “New public management is dead – long live digital era governance” published in the early years of the new millennium, Dunleavy et al. [7] ring the storm bell, and ten years later summon the public sector to “… completely embrace and imbed electronical delivery at the heart of the government business model, whenever possible” [8]. Equally strong words were used by chairman Schwab of the World Economic Forum in 2016, when he described the use of new technologies (i.e., IoT, AI, sensors, robots, etc.) as “the fourth industrial revolution” and continued: “We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another” [9]. The acclaimed transformation has been associated with, for example, smart cities [10], algorithmic bureaucracy [11], predictivity and profiling of citizens within public health care, law enforcement, and crime labs [12, 13], and platform government [14, 15].

Yet, it is highly contended whether radical transformation of government can be documented and in whether impacts of the assumed transformation have occurred in the areas planned when acquiring new technologies [16]. Moreover, Wilson found that new technologies will be adopted by public sector organizations “… only when the new, sophisticated bit of technology is consistent with existing tasks … if the new technology requires a redefinition of core tasks it will be resisted” [17].

Possibly linked to the lack of evidence of transformative strength and direction, managers have expressed frustrations when it comes to leadership of digitalization. The iconic paper on “Computers and the frustrated chief executive” from the late 1970s illustrates well why managers can be at odds using IT as a change facilitator for incremental and more radical changes of government: “Top managers’ current frustration with [computers] is primarily grounded in the perceived lack of specific benefits … and in operational problems” [18]. Although potential benefits of new technologies include general improvements of interactions, government is highly focused on enhancement of capabilities (i.e., efficiency, effectiveness, and information quality) [19] to decrease costs and reduce administrative burdens for companies and citizens [20].

Contrasting the focus on management of digital government (DG), for example, IT project management and IT mediated leadership (e-leadership) to achieve these goals, leadership of DG has been only marginally researched despite an entire research field on public sector leadership to build upon.

A range of studies have called for attention to top management leadership [21–26] and their ability to cope with the high speed of digital change and deep shift in organizational culture [27]. Also, several conceptual studies and literature reviews have aimed to synthesize general themes and methods, and the like, within digital government (DG), e-government and e-governance, impact of e-government [28–31], and Information and Computer Technology (ICT) mediated leadership [32, 33]. Yet, there is great uncertainty on how to understand, theorize, and provide research-based input to practice on the leadership of digitalization. Particularly there is a research gap on how DG is led by the C-suite (CEOs, CIOs, CDOs, CFOs, CPOs, etc.) executive level of government.

Against this backdrop of research, the key research question in this article is how C-suite managers are leading the digitalization of the public sector. In pursuing this objective, we explore the nature of digital government leadership (DGL) with two sub-questions: 1) How are the C-suite level of government leading digitalization? and 2) How can the leadership and the associated roles be conceptualized?

We explore these questions by synthesizing top leadership literature from the public administration field and studies on digital change in key e-government and information systems journals into a conceptual Digital Government Leadership (DGL) framework. Thus, our article is in the sweet spot, or crossroad [30] as Gil-Garcia et al. characterized it, between digital government research and public management research aiming to stimulate more collaboration between the research communities and to bring awareness of how leadership unfolds in theory and practice.

The article is structured as follows. First, we establish our conceptual understanding of public sector leadership and digital government. The foundation outlined in this section will be our platform for a comprehensive literature review of articles published in leading e-government, information systems, and public administration journals. Secondly, we present the applied methods and processes for mapping key concepts in the DGL literature and how we have crystalized the key elements in the proposed DGL framework. Thirdly, we outline a DGL framework, which categorizes the core DGL concepts of what public leaders do when leading digitalization according to the reviewed literature.

Fourthly, motivated by the work on engaged scholarship [34], we bridge the gulf between theory and practice, which in much academic literature is either omitted or limited to a few paragraphs at the very end of research papers or included as part of the motivation of the research papers. As we fully acknowledge that there might be implications for practice also of more theoretical papers without authors explicitly suggesting possible implications, we have allocated a larger part of the paper to discuss the results and conclude the article by outlining possible implications for practice and further research. In the section on implications for practice, we present various roles of top managers and outline actions we have identified in the literature for possible inspiration for C-suite leadership.

In the appendices to the article, we have included a detailed account of search details and results (Appendix A), methodological characteristics of the included articles in the review (methods, geographical location, unit of analysis, and leadership focus) (Appendix B), and the concept matrix generated through our in-depth inductive literature review (Appendix C).

Our point of departure for investigating how C-suite managers are leading the digitalization of the public sector is to contextualize the DGL with regards to general management research, leadership theories, and the general work on government and governance. Also, our research builds upon prior research to define e-government and e-governance. Thus, we aim to understand and exercise DGL on top of the shoulders of the research within these domains. For example, an explicit definition of e-government and e-governance helps focus the research mapping of DGL, distillate the components of DGL, and the possible forward actions leaders can apply to stimulate DGL. In this article we will therefore analyze the specific DGL-literature upon the comprehensive backbone of literature and insights derived within these areas. By taking this approach we aim at contributing with knowledge to these fields and to be on safe grounds when proposing implications for practice as an outcome of the literature review later in this article. Thus, we will in this first section outline how we view the link between the digitalization of government and the extensive literature of leadership and management. Also, we will explicate how we conceptualize the difference between government and governance.

Roman et al. have defined [32] and operationalized [33] the concept of e-leadership to describe the use of ICT-mediated communication between leaders and followers as a tool for leadership. This implies social processes with the aim to influence thinking, attitudes, and cultural behavior within the organization by use of technology, which require e-leadership skills related to communication, social, change, teams, tech savvy, and trustworthiness [32]. Yet, our focus is on leadership of technology in the public sector, not on leadership processes involving technology. Hence, we define public sector leadership in general terms as “the process of (1) providing the results required by authorized processes in an efficient, effective, and legal manner, (2) developing and supporting followers who provide those results, and (3) aligning the organization with its environment” [35].

Public sector leadership comes in many formats and activities [35–38] and with several theoretical (overlapping) layers. Van Wart outlines five main arenas for public sector leadership theory: Management (leading for results), transactional leadership (leading the followers), transformational leadership (leading organizations), horizontal and collaborative leadership (leading systems), and ethical leadership (leading with values) [37]. In our forward work on identifying specific research on DGL we rely on this broad-spectrum perspective the activities and formats of leadership. By doing so, we aim at capturing a broader and potentially also more relevant pool of research.

In our article we use “public sector” and “government” interchangeably. However, we do distinguish whether the digitalization is within government boundaries or part of governance. Grönlund and Horan summarize a simple distinction that government has to do with what is happening within the government organization, while governance refers to the whole system involved in managing society [39]. Bovaird and Löffler further clarify that public governance is “how an organization works with its partners, stakeholders, and networks to influence the outcomes of public policies” [40]. The term “governance” has gained traction in relation to information technology but is used inconsistently with different meanings [39, 41].

The e-government and e-governance literature is by large focused on changing operation, communications, routines, and the like, to reach a predetermined goal such as increasing the public value through improvement of public services, administration, and social values [42]. The concepts of e-government, e-governance, and digital government have evolved to describe the use of information technologies in the public sector [41, 43, 44]. Scholl defines e-government as “the use of information and technology to support and improve public policies and government operations, engage citizens, and provide comprehensive and timely government services” [45]. He identifies the research to be focused on electronic and transformational government, ICT's, e-democracy, and e-participation [46].

Gil-Garcia et al. take a broader stance with more focus on the involvement of stakeholders: “DG as a phenomenon involves new styles of leadership, new decision-making processes, different ways of organizing and delivering services, and new concepts of citizenship” [30]. Following this argument, Gil-Garcia et al. define DG as: “The public sector's use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) with the aim of improving information and service delivery, encouraging citizen participation in the decision-making process, and making government more accountable, transparent, and effective” [30]. Building on this definition of DG, this article adds the dimension of public leadership to explore the nature of DGL.

While e-leadership is mainly focused on leadership and competencies at the individual micro level [32], e-government and e-governance have focused on institutional levels by for example addressing the institutional level of government policies and the collaboration with other institutions, citizens, and the like, to generate public value [42]. The concept of DGL is providing a link between the individual and the institutional level of public leadership of digitalization.

The empirical foundation of this paper is a comprehensive in-depth literature review on digital government leadership. Guided by the proposed structured review method advocated by Webster and Watson [47] and following the examples of other researchers within the field [30, 31, 42] and their selection of journals, we focused the research on top research journals to prioritize depth and quality. Hence, we limited the search to published and early access articles in four leading public administration journals: (Public Administration (PA), Public Administration Review (PAR), Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (JPART), and Public Management Review (PMR)) and four leading e-government/IS journals: (Management Information Systems Quarterly (MISQ), European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS), Government Information Quarterly (GIQ), and Digital Government: Research and Practice (DGOV)).

When reviewing literature from the two research communities of PA and e-gov/IS we followed the recommendation of Cronin and George to first treat each of the research communities individually before integrating these [48]. Within the PA-journals we assumed all articles to be within the public sector domain. Hence, we searched on “information technology” and “digital” in combination with “leadership” and “management”. For the e-gov/IS-journals we assumed all articles to be within the e-gov/IS domain and searched on “public” and “govern*” in combination with “leadership” and “management”. In our initial search we included full articles, proceeding papers, editorials, and reviews, while book reviews were excluded. This search generated 520 articles, with 25% (n = 129) in the PA-field and 75% (n = 391) within the e-gov/IS-field. In Appendix A we have included details of the search process.

The abstracts of the 520 identified articles were analyzed and included if the article covered all three dimensions of the review – digital, government, and leadership. We excluded reviews, editorials, viewpoints, theorizing, modelling, and conceptualizing articles based on secondary data. Whereas most articles have some relevance for leadership, far fewer articles explicitly consider the leadership dimension. Articles with none or vague explicit considerations on leadership or management of DG were excluded. Besides, articles focused on project management of IT-projects at a technical project level were considered out of the scope for this review.

While we used the software tool silvi.ai to allow for multiple reviewers and tracking the process of inclusion/ exclusion of each article, we did not use any AI functionalities. The first author examined all articles, while the second author spot checked articles and all the finally included articles aligning judgements. The screening of the abstracts resulted in 46 articles from PA-journals and 54 articles from e-gov/IS-journals – in total, 100 articles. A full text examination of the hundred articles further reduced the number of articles to 11 from PA-journals and 20 from e-gov/IS-journals. The final list of 31 included articles is listed in Appendix B. Thus, roughly one third of the DGL articles are within the PA-field and two-thirds within the e-gov/IS-field.

During the screening of the articles, the main topics of 489 excluded articles (520 articles in the initial round minus the 31 articles in the final basket of the analysis) were recorded. The most frequent topics were adoption and diffusion of IT, digital innovation, data-/information management, employee-/tech relation, project management, and impact of IT and e-democracy aspects such as citizen participation, transparency, digital divide, and use of social media.

Conceptual articles based on inductive coding risk having a bias with regards to research fields, methodology, geography, and so on [47, 48]. In order to provide transparency on this concern, Appendix B outlines the patterns across the batch of 31 included articles, while the subsequent analysis focuses on the content of the articles. 35% of the articles rely on quantitative methods, 32% qualitative methods, and 33% a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods. The PA-articles are distributed almost evenly on method, which deviate from the finding of Gil-Garcia et al. that PA primarily use quantitative methods to study DG [30]. The majority of e-gov/IS-articles use qualitative methods such as interviews and observations. The USA is the most frequently studied country with the rest of the articles fairly spread globally. However, we found no articles on DGL in emerging economies and least developed countries. The US bias and lack of inclusion of emerging economies is parallel to general limitation for DG literature [42]. The units of analyses in the articles are governments at national, regional, and especially the local level. Most articles concern general (or unspecified) leadership, and few articles specifically concern the C-suite level of management, which is a major research gap, as DG is no longer a restricted domain of IT-leaders but highly dependent on top management [26, 49]. As revealed above, there are imbalances in the methodological characteristics of the articles. Yet, we do not regard the articles to have significant biases and we find it justified to proceed with the analysis of the content of the articles.

Following the Webster and Watson suggestion of a concept-centric approach [47], the final set of articles were categorized into key concepts to identify sub-areas of DGL. Following grounded theory and open coding principles [50] 29 concepts were crystalized. The initial coding round was done by “letting data speak” and adopting original concepts from the articles. Through the second round, axial coding [50] was applied clustering the concepts by rereading the articles, looking for concepts and their context. Through multiple rounds of iterative analytical processes between data display, reduction, and conclusions [51], the initial 29 concepts were reduced to 10 final concepts. In Appendix C, we have displayed the detailed concept-matrix distributed on articles whereas Figure 1 displays the initial 29 concepts (smaller fonts) and the 10 final concepts (larger and bold-faced font). For example, decision-making includes three of the initial concepts (portfolio management, investments, and decision processes and content).

Guided by solid methodological approaches [47, 48, 50, 51] to ensure a systematic process of searching, coding, clustering, and conceptualizing, we have arrived at 10 key DGL concepts. Figure 2 presents the total number of articles with citations of each concept, and the distribution on e-gov/IS-journals and PA-journals. Articles from PA-journals are broadly occupied with 8 of the 10 key concepts, in particular “citizen participation”, while the articles from e-gov/IS-journals are spread across all concepts with the most focus on “role of top managers”. This distribution of articles underlines that even though research fields of PA and e-gov/IS origins from different positions, they have a significant pool of common interests in the research field of DGL. Two of the concepts are derived from the IS/e-gov journals only (IT management and agile organization) indicating more focus on these aspects of leadership in this subset of journals. Also, there is a greater variety of concepts used and nine of the concepts have more coverage in the IS/e-gov journals. The only area where PA-journals have more studies is within tech acceptance.

We have derived 10 concepts presented in Figures 1 and 2, which outlined different aspects of leadership of digital government. The essence of each of the 10 concepts are summarized below, and the characteristics are further unfolded in Section 4.1.

The concept of agile and adaptive organization concerns the need for dynamic and flexible ways of governing and organizing digital government, including integrative approaches founded in the concept of Digital Era Governance by Dunleavy et al. [7]. Citizen participation focuses on the involvement of citizens in public digitalization with the aim to adapt public services to citizens, companies, and so on, and to mobilize resources from the community. Besides, several of the articles are rooted in design thinking approaches. Collaborative governance is about sharing data and working with other public agencies, companies, and the like, to perform public tasks, which is further described in Section 4.1. Decision making concerns the process of preparing and taking decisions on IT-investments, portfolio management, and so on. Applying a critical lens, the concept of digital risk society discusses management approaches to concerns of citizens and media about digitalization of society, digital events as data breaches and the consequences for issues as equal access to public services, trust, ethics, accountability, and transparency of government. The concept of IT-innovation encompasses elements as leading gradual and radical innovation of IT-systems, new use of big data, as well as the risk taking of public managers and organizations by introducing emergent technologies. IT management covers a wide range of both strategic and more operational management tasks related to governance, development, procurement, monitoring, architecture and security of government IT and specific IT-projects sometimes involving private suppliers. The approach to IT management is often technical, applying various management tools. The role of top managers involves functions and actions of top managers, which are further detailed in Section 5.1. The concept smart cities for public value concerns the use of digital technologies in leading urban development projects, which often involves non-government stakeholders and strive to achieve public value from a citizen perspective. Lastly, tech acceptance refers to the resistance of public employees towards using digital technologies and the managerial strategies to overcome the skepticism, to diffuse and to anchor technology in government processes.

The above section illuminates that DGL is an assorted box of components and a unconsolidated research field with a multitude of focus areas and approaches. With the ambition to qualify the understanding of how C-suite managers are leading the digitalization of government, we will in this section propose a DGL framework, which contributes to categorizing the DGL literature and to offer a framework of reference to scholars and practitioners.

Based on our inductive coding and analysis of the DGL articles, we found an emerging pattern in the fragmented literature by categorizing the 10 concepts according to leadership direction and leadership mode. The leadership direction of focus, being either inward or outward of the government institution, is inspired by the governance literature shifting focus from internal processes in government institutions to external governance processes involving NGOs, interorganizational networks, private companies, and other actors in society [52–54]. This distinction reflects the sovereign state being replaced by the idea of decentered governance based on interdependence and trust between government and other institutions [52].

In line with this development, a large part of the early literature on leading digitalization is focused on inward leadership of the government institutions, while there has been an increasing focus in theory and practice on the outward orientation of leading collaboration in the governance of digitalization [39, 40]. This is also the tendency in the reviewed DGL literature, which implies public leadership of digitalization being not entirely an internal discipline but also encompassing leadership of the collaborations with other government institutions, citizens, NGO's, private companies, and society in general. This wider outward perspective may provide a more needs based holistic [7] and agile response to complex society problems, but it may also come with managerial or even democratic costs depending on approach, context, and so on [52, 55].

The second dimension, leadership mode, concerns the distinction between transition-transformation suggested by Anderson and Anderson as part of the change management literature [56]. Transition has to do with leadership of a relatively simple and linear process from state A to state B focusing on structures, technologies, and work processes. In contrast, transformation is focused at agile and circular learning processes requiring shift in human behavior and mindset. The outcome of transformation is initially unclear, but the focus of change is a radical overhaul of the strategy, structure, processes, and culture of the organization [56]. Naturally, not all IT-leadership - involve transition or transformation. The somewhat tedious issues of daily maintenance and improvements of digital solutions account for a big chunk of resources and management attention to digitalization. However, digitalization is a process of change [57] and digitalization is widely considered a key driver for changes in the public organizations and leadership roles [7, 58, 59]. This is also reflected in the DGL literature, where digital change is at the core of the research field.

The two dimensions outlined above compose the proposed DGL framework. In Table 1 the DGL concepts are distributed along the two dimensions (direction and mode of leadership) according to the content of the articles forming the basis of the concepts. Further, each of the four categories are provided with the number of articles contributing to the category and a label summarizing the essence of the literature: Exploitation (decision-making, tech acceptance, and IT management), collaboration (collaborative governance), innovation (IT-innovation), and exploration (citizen participation, smart cities for public value, agile and adaptive governance, and digital risk society). These categories encapsulate what top public leaders do to lead digitalization.

The four categories in the DGL framework (exploitation, collaboration, innovation, and exploration) outline what public top leaders do in order to lead digitalization. In this section the framework is supplemented by corresponding digital leadership roles of top managers presented as four archetype “professions” with associated actions and examples, which are inspired using “personas” in design literature [86, 87]. In line with this literature, the aim is to communicate abstract leadership roles through means of identification with professions. The roles and actions are founded in the DGL literature and our inductive coding and analysis, but we have in the labeling of roles added images of each of the roles. Afterwards we summarize the key findings of our research and conceptualize the crosscutting issue of the role of top managers by proposing a definition of DGL.

The overall conclusions derived from this conceptual article on digital government leadership include methodological and substantial elements. With regards to methodological contribution there are two key elements. Firstly, our ambition to contribute to theorizing about DGL took its point of departure in a theoretical sound body of literature on public management and e-gov/IS research. Secondly, through an extensive mapping and synthesizing of literature, the paper inductively generated a framework for public sector C-suite leadership of digital change.

In the paper we have applied a structured literature review approach with a replicable search-procedure and transparent coding process, where choices, the initial coding concepts, and the concept matrix are made explicit. Yet, searching, selecting, coding, and clustering into meta-concept can lead to exclusion of details and is subject to biases of the authors. Other limitations are differences in how explicit articles account for their ontology, epistemology, methodology, and the empirical contexts, which makes it challenging to identify and document patterns in DGL research, where research on top management and political leadership is scattered on a range of concepts. Paying careful attention to the potential methodological limitations, the article offers three key substantial conclusions.

Firstly, the article proposes a definition of what digital government leadership is. DGL is to exploit existing digital opportunities to solve imminent challenges and to explore new digital opportunities to undertake the core mission of the public organization, while managing for results, leading followers, and aligning with the environment towards a clearly articulated vision. In balancing short-term and long-term objectives, leaders need to build on the potential within the organization and the external stakeholders. Yet, leaders need to articulate directly and with great clarity the vision and the assignment as they lead the digital change.

Secondly, the article points out the apparent paradoxical situation that while government can be associated with hierarchical and clear command-of-line, leadership of digitalization appears to be much more of a team effort within the organization and involving the surrounding stakeholders in a governance perspective. Taking this inclusive approach adds to the complexity of DGL, and it is therefore a key task of the C-suite management to determine which digitalization processes may be solved by relatively simple linear processes within the government and which digitalization processes require a more inclusive and circular approach to succeed and not least gain the necessary support from key stakeholders.

Thirdly, the article proposes an inductive driven conceptual framework to comprehend the leadership of digital transition and transformation of government. The DGL framework captures four clusters of concepts of leadership of digitalization (exploitation, collaboration, innovation, and exploration) and four corresponding leadership roles (the farmer, the diplomat, the inventor, and the entrepreneur) derived from e-gov/IS and public management literature. We strongly advocate for more collaboration between the two communities in order to elevate our understanding of the dynamics of DGL.

The North-West and South-East diagonal between exploitation and exploration in the DGL framework is the most prevalently articulated in the research we have analyzed. Although digitalization, and in particular the more recent waves of digitalization, is associated with finding new ways and elevating existing ways of communication and collaborating with citizens, companies, non-profit organizations, and other public organization, we find limited research on these areas. Also, the innovation category in our framework is less populated with studies that can qualify how leadership of digital innovation is done and what the actions of leaders are when pursuing innovation of government or governance.

The proposed framework and roles can help box-in the challenges leaders experience and the decision options leaders must take within when pushing digitalization forward. Hence, the framework contributes with a framework of reference, or language, for scholars and practitioners to comprehend, discuss and navigate the quest of digital government leadership. We encourage other scholars to further research the four categories of the DGL framework through empirical studies on how the roles of top public managers are practiced. Also, we encourage the C-suite of managers to be inspired by the framework and roles when practicing leadership.