Digital Maturity in the Public Sector and Citizens’ Sentiment Towards Authorities : A study within the initiative Academy of Lifelong Learning, in partnership with RISE and Google

Sammanfattning: This study was conducted in partnership with RISE and Google, within the initiative “Academy of Lifelong Learning”, aiming to propel the digital transformation in the Swedish public sector. The study investigated the digital maturity of 18 authorities in terms of maturity level (early, developing maturing), and within the driving areas (1) Citizen Centricity, (2) Leadership, (3) Digital Toolbox and (4) Security and Sustainability. Further, it explored how citizens’ sentiment towards public authorities relates to the organizations’ digital maturity scores. The results of a digital maturity survey showed that 16 of the 18 contributing organizations were developing, whereas two scored just enough to be classified as maturing. The organizations performed best within Security and Sustainability, and the worst within the category Digital Toolbox—where the biggest competence gaps were also identified. To unlock citizens’ sentiment towards the authorities, sentiment analysis was conducted on Facebook data. In a correlation analysis, a significant negative relationship was surprisingly found between (i) maturity score and (ii) sentiment score, as well as between (i) maturity score and (ii) positive comments. Presumably, this can be explained by citizens interacting the most with the more mature organizations and thus expressing their dissatisfaction more. However, more analysis is needed to draw conclusions.