Assessing the Technological Landscape: ICT Tools and Technologies for Citizen-Government Communication and Their Level of Maturity

Sammanfattning: In today's rapidly evolving digital age, the relationship between citizens and government entities has undergone a transformative shift, primarily facilitated by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Transformational Government (T-Gov) is considered a technological innovation and a shift to a new entrepreneurial culture from inefficient, unaccountable bureaucracy generally observed within public organizations. T-Gov involves e-government, business process reengineering, and business scope revaluation with the ambition to be more citizen-centric. This thesis presents in an aggregated fashion ICT tools and technologies that ameliorate interaction between citizens and public organizations by providing solutions to frequent issues that citizens raise as part of transformational government. When presenting those ICT tools, it is essential to depict how ICT tools and technologies are transforming public values and how assessing the maturity level of the tools for a more comprehensive retrospect of how digital tools have metamorphosed citizens, public organizations, and public officials' interactions. Here then comes the research problem as there is a lack of systematic review on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) tools support to address citizens' issues as part of government transformation and a scarcity of systematic examination of the overall maturity landscape. Hence, research questions have been formulated: What ICT tools and technologies are available to address frequent issues citizens raise to public organizations to improve public services? What is the maturity level of those ICT tools and technologies? Which were answered by conducting a survey through a systematic literature review strategy. The data collection included identifying articles and systematically selecting relevant ones through screening criteria and then extracting data from those articles. The data analysis method was done through a thematic approach to extract public values embedded in those ICT tools and assess their maturity level. Supportive tools like Atlas.ti and concept matrix-assisted in extracting emerging themes from those ICT tools. These emerging themes are public values offered by those ICT tools and technologies. The maturity level assessment of each ICT tool and technology grouped into ICT solutions was based on the general availability of the solution in the market. However, the Technology Readiness Level method (TRL) evaluated each ICT tool and technology contextually. The results were an exhaustive list of ICT Solutions, each being a set of ICT tools, mapped to the public values they deliver and Citizens' frequent issues they address. The result incorporated the maturity level of each ICT tool and the ICT Solution. The maturity from the market level was also included. The discussion explained in detail how ICT tools and technologies have transformed each public value delivered by public organizations. In conclusion, grounded on the results, this thesis has brought to light at an in-depth level how matured ICT tools and technologies have substantially transformed public values by analyzing profoundly the state of each public value offered before and after the deployment of each ICT solution within public organizations, laying a pace to a strategic adoption of these solutions, thus contributing to more efficient, citizen-centric public services, which implies addressing citizens issues.