Keywords

1 Introduction

Digital government initiatives is the use of information and communications technology (ICT) in the public sector to provide citizens, businesses, and government employees high-quality oriented services [1,2,3]. Increased ICT access is vital for bridging the digital gap, promoting effective governance, and advancing sustainable development. Digital government initiatives have improved the delivery of public services, but their overall impact in developing nations such as Pakistan has been hampered by an abundance of rules and a slower adoption rate. Everyone has the right to expect quick services from the government and easy access to information that is correct and often complete [4]. Governments continue to be collectors, consumers, preservers, and creators of primary data and aren’t realizing their full potential. Governments must modernize in response to rapid changes in society and the economy, and information technology may aid in this endeavor. In recent years, however, government e-services have not been sufficiently concentrated on citizens.

The 2022 United Nations E-Government Survey [5] reveals that several nations have implemented e-government initiatives and information and communication technologies (ICT) applications for the public in order to enhance public sector efficiencies and streamline governance systems in support of sustainable development. The government’s digital initiatives can be motivated by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Leaders in e-government see innovative technical solutions to boost economic and social sectors that are falling behind. In the current global recessionary climate, the overall conclusion of the 2012 Survey is that governments must rethink e-government and e-governance [5], placing greater emphasis on institutional linkages and among the tiers of government structures to create synergy for inclusive, sustainable development. To reach this goal, it is important to broaden the reach of digital initiatives so that the government can play a transformative role by putting in place procedures and institutions that support sustainable development [5, 6].

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven the relevance of digitalization for the timely and efficient provision of government services. Digital services are basically the fruitful results of digital government initiatives for better service provisions. Countries with a proper road map for digital government initiatives performed well during the pandemic era, and they are confident that these digital initiatives will perform well in the coming days as well. Governments have developed the digital portals, where users may get a plethora of relevant information organized by topic, life cycle, or other chosen usage, are backed by technical advances that promote data exchange and successful optimization of cross-agency governance systems. Services personalization in the digital portals is becoming popular, and more and more countries are changing their content and presentation to suit different initiatives. Digital government initiatives may position the public sector as a demand generator for ICT infrastructure and applications. When government digital initiatives make up a large part of a country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and the regulatory environment encourages the growth of ICT manufacturing, software, and related services, the effect will be stronger [4].

However, several developing countries in Asia, such as Pakistan, are not well versed in the provision of government’s digital initiatives. There can be several reasons for this, such as technological, the economy, population, and the literacy rate. Governments lack a grasp of how to initiate digital initiatives and what actions must be followed for digital initiatives to be effective. What are the main attributes and sub-attributes of a government’s digital initiatives, and how can a government implement them? For instance, how can the government launch a digital initiative to increase transparency in government? The government might be able to give its people digital initiatives that use “open data” to improve transparency. To answer this research question, we developed a framework based on the extraction of determining factors for government digital initiatives, and then compared Pakistani and Greek governments to validate our framework. In this study, we will provide a theoretical and practical framework for successful governments’ digital initiatives along with the determining factors, which we call the attributes and sub-attributes of successful governments’ digital initiatives (GDIs).

Existing studies discuss government assessment frameworks such as the UN e-government survey [5], Open Data Watch (ODIN), the digital Economy and society index (DESI), and web-portal-based assessments [7], government structure and citizen engagement-based assessments [8], and government accountability [9]. In this study, we will combine all of these indices and define attributes and sub-attributes that evaluate government digital initiatives in conjunction with open data-based initiatives. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed framework includes open data as a digital initiative alongside other government digital initiatives, such as the use of AI and blockchain in government.

The main contributions of this research are:

  • To extract and define the attributes and sub-attributes for the GDI’s framework development

  • To categorize the digital initiatives provisioned by the government as “provided,” “not provided,” and “partially provided” based on our GDIs framework.

  • To determine Pakistan’s and Greece’s current positions in government digital initiatives with the help of our developed framework

  • To provide academics and practitioners a way to evaluate GDIs in any other country in the world.

The words “factor,” “pillars,” and “attributes” are used as synonyms in this study. The remainder of the article is structured as follows: The second section explains digital initiatives, e-governments, and advancements in ICT, considering research publications and grey documents. In the third section, existing factors to measure the success of digital government initiatives have been discussed. We added more factors (attributes and sub-attributes) to the existing factors to make it a more extensive study. A comparison has been drawn between Greece’s and Pakistan’s based on our developed framework. The fourth section describes how these two nations approach digital government initiatives and adoption patterns and their success based on the scale of service provision, such as “provided”, “not provided”, or “partially provided”. The final section concludes the research with the overall findings, limitations, and future work.

2 Literature Review

E-government is regarded as the initial stage of digital government. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines digital government as “the use of digital technologies as an integrated part of governments’ modernization strategies to create public value” and that it “relies on a digital government ecosystem comprised of government actors, non-governmental organizations, businesses, citizens’ associations, and individuals that supports the production of and access to data, services, and content through interoperable technologies”. “E-government” is defined as “the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), and the Internet in particular, by governments to improve government”. The digital governments initiatives play a vital role in the development of E-government. The pandemic has given the digital government a new lease on life and helped to define its role, both in the way it delivers digital services and in the new, creative ways it handles crises [10, 11]. The e-government ranking of the countries depends upon the difference factors such as country’s gross domestic product(GDP) and its e-government ranking, money is not the only important factor in the development of e- government [12]. According to the 2020 UN e-government survey, Denmark, Estonia, and Korea top the rankings [1]. During the last few years, COVID-19 affected governments, particularly municipalities, to pursue services using innovative technologies, but a vast number of people were unable to access digital services, as published in the UN e-government survey [5].

Most of the time, developing nations are compelled to devote resources to undertaking fundamental changes, such as e-Government, based on models that may not work in settings that are significantly unlike those in the developed world [13, 14]. In underdeveloped countries, a new field of study concerning digital-government-related issues and the usability of e-government websites is expanding, whereas public perspectives (participation) are receiving less attention [15]. Incorporating citizens into the policy-making process is one of the most significant benefits of using e-government services [16, 17]. Even if a new digital initiative or service is developed by the government, the laws related to these digital initiatives and services may slow down the adoption rate in the country [18,19,20].

Davison et al. (2005) argue that people develop a preference for citizen-centric and responsive e-government websites. In a number of developing countries, e-government websites are not available in native and local languages, indicating that e-government is meant only for a minority of educated individuals. The European Commission published the four key indicators as an e-government benchmark initiative (user centricity, transparency, key-enablers, and cross-border mobility) with the title “eGovernment Benchmark 2020: eGovernment that Works for the People” to measure e-government performance in Europe [7].

Recently, other studies have been published which considers the development and evaluation of e-governments. We used the term “digital government initiatives” for the “e-government development”. To measure the governments’ digital initiatives(GDIs), different attributes (pillars) and sub-attributes will be extracted from the literature Irawan et al., for example, provide two (2) evaluation models for government websites, with the two models divided into two components: technical and democratic deliberation. The first website evaluation model is the “Qiyuan Fan Website Evaluation Model”, which contributes to the e-services section of the pillars (in our study) by providing the financial transactions and the e-procurement sub-pillars of the comparison. The second model is the “Lee-Geiller & Lee Website Evaluation Model”, which also contributed to the transparency and e-services sub-pillars. The interoperability of services, coordination at the national level, and error management are some of the sub-pillars of the e-government comparison [21]. The government website evaluation is a key part of the e-government comparison(digital government initiatives) as a whole [17, 22].

As Wu et al. said, “An efficient performance measurement system is essential for controlling, monitoring, and improving service quality in governmental organizations”. Their contribution to the comparison is the “Government Structures” pillar, which focuses on the learning and growth of employees, which is an essential measurement of e-government initiatives. More specifically, the “government structures” have staff training and knowledge management, staff satisfaction, and internal communication, which are some of the sub-pillars. Wu et al. also proposed the “Citizen Engagement” pillar with the responsiveness to inquiries and complaints and the political efficacy sub-pillars of the comparison [8].

One of the most important parts of the e-government comparison is the accountability section. Ibrahim et al. have proposed a framework for the evaluation of accountability based on web-based accountability practices; their developed framework uses financial, performance, and political accountability as the main pillars for the evaluation models. We have selected the “accountability” pillar from Ibrahim et al. along with its sub-pillars for our study [9]. The “Use of Disruptive technologies” pillar is constructed based on the cutting-edge technologies for the e-government such as Fintech, block chain, and AI. The use of disruptive technologies is important to develop smart cities, and consequently, in developed countries, the governments are focused on the use of these technologies for digital government initiatives [23]. Finally, the state audit office of Hungary has introduced good governance pillars such as lawmaking, accountability, transparency, economic and financial sustainability, a model organization, and reasonable and effective financial management [24]. These good governance pillars are indirectly related to the digital government initiatives, and we have used them to extract some new sub-pillars for our study, such as accountability and transparency-related sub-pillars.

Different articles discussed the pillars, factors, or attributes to measure the success of digital government initiatives, but in this study, an all-factors-encompassing framework could be useful. For instance, previous studies mentioned the evaluation of government websites, citizen engagements, the role of staff training, accountability, technicalities, and government preferences to evaluate digital government initiatives. However, we evolved with more factors to measure the success of GDIs such as “government structures”, “e-services by government”, “use of disruptive technologies”, “transparency”, “accountability”, and “citizen engagement” to make this study more comprehensive. Each main pillar has been enriched with sub-pillars as described in the literature, and we have added some more sub-pillars to elaborate more on the digital government initiatives such as “Use of disruptive technologies”, where we have introduced some sub-pillars such as use of block chain, AI, and FinTech. In the transparency pillar, we have introduced a sub-pillar for the use of open, big, and linked data for transparent e-government as a digital government initiative. This is the uniqueness of our study among others in that we have considered open data as a digital government initiative for the evaluation of e-governments.

3 Proposed Methodology

The entire procedure is depicted in Fig. 1. This study began by extracting the most essential digital government attributes, features, properties, pillars, and sub-dependent attributes. These characteristics are essential for measuring the government’s Transparency and accountability in a systematic manner. In Sect. 2 of this research, the attributes or pillars that are directly or indirectly important to digital government are taken from the published literature and policy papers by researchers and governments. Government structures, E-services, the use of disruptive technology, transparency, accountability, and citizen engagement are the six characteristics of digital government. After extracting the six primary attributes of digital government, the next step is to carefully identify sub-attributes associated with each of the six core attributes.

Regarding government initiatives, this list of characteristics is not comprehensive; there may be many more. Several countries may have distinct perspectives, policies, and standards for digital services, for instance. One important point of view is that the government may have missed out on some digital services because of the high cost of technology devices and budget constraints. Each attribute and sub-attribute are exhaustively defined and discussed in the next section. This research can be used in the future to analyze the available services and orientations that are superior in one nation and inferior in another. The Greece and Pakistan have been chosen for the validation and application of our developed framework. We have used the snowball method to search the attributes and sub-attributes for both countries. There was no conflict of interest while deciding about the attributes’ and sub-attributes’ availability in each country because we just visited the official government websites to find out the relevant information. The reason behind the selection of these countries is that the authors belong to these two countries, and the validation of the framework will be quite easy to perform.

This study will help us trace the two nations’ digital government advancements in each field. This is the age of the fourth industrial revolution, and it may be important to find the areas that need more attention to improve governance and, indirectly, make governments more accountable and open. We are aware that several countries are facing financial troubles because of the current global epidemic, making these attributes even more crucial. There may be further obstacles like these outbreaks in the future. There is a unique answer to every situation; it is the utilization of technical solutions to improve the future by putting residents’ needs first. In the evaluation of governments’ digital initiatives, the government structure such as population, area, ministries, staff training, and internal communication mechanisms are to be measured for each country. This information will help estimate the cost of the digital initiatives and their effectiveness.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Proposed methodology for extracting government attributes and sub-attributes and exploring their roles in Governments (e.g., in Greece and Pakistan)

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E-services are also significant in digital governance. And the government can readily provide a variety of e-services to end-users in a timely and effective manner. Innovation with disruptive technology is also an essential factor to consider while evaluating digital governance. IOT, block chain, FinTech, robotics, cloud-computing, and AI are disruptive technologies to provide the finest services ever to citizens [23].

Transparency in government is a crucial metric for determining the efficacy of the government and its policies. The sub-attributes of transparency are significant and aid in exploring opaque government areas for future improvement. Public sector digital accountability evaluates the effectiveness of previous policies and decisions. This helps improve governance and reduce poverty by making sure that government programs meet their stated goals and the needs of the people they are meant to help. Participation of citizens is essential for effective governance. It allows private individuals and groups to inform, influence, monitor, and assess public choices, procedures, and actions. The primary objective of public involvement is to foster significant public input during the decision-making process. Therefore, public involvement facilitates communication between the public and entities that make decisions. The other important factor is the corruption index in developing countries. Several politicians are creating problems in the way of digital government. Greece and Pakistan are also listed in the corruption index published by World data and Transparency international [25]. Focus must be placed on the digitization of government financial flows in order to build transparent and accountable governments. The Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) is a second index that uses predefined indicators to measure how well digital services work in European countries. The European Commission has been using the DESI index since 2014 to measure the digital progress in the member states of Europe. The DESI key areas are very helpful for comparing the progress of countries, but we added a few other indicators as well, such as the use of disruptive technology and its sub-attributes in the public sector [26].

4 Findings and Experiences

Table 1 explains the pillars of E-government and applied these pillars to Greek and Pakistani government. We used the ministries website, and their initiatives websites to illustrate the current situation in each electronic pillar in e-government. This study helped us to evaluate the digital government initiatives. The countries evaluated in this study were Greece and Pakistan. For the comparison of digital government initiatives, Greece is a developed country, selected from the European continent, and Pakistan is a developing country, selected from the Asian continent. The purpose was to elaborate on the differences between the digital initiatives in both countries. There are three scales used to indicate whether a specific GDIs pillar or sub-pillar is “provided”, “not provided”, or “partially” given. This comparison assisted in determining where developing countries lag behind developed countries in digital government initiatives.

The Pakistani government had been evaluated based on the identified pillars and sub-pillars of digital governments initiatives. Pakistan touched upon every aspect of the digital government but during the evaluation, there are some obstacles in the way of digital government initiatives: a few of them are the lack of information technology management system, low financial conditions, corruption, less user-oriented services, and political instability. The one more important finding of this study was that the Pakistani government gives just a few datasets to the citizens about the government activities for the transparent government (open government data). For instance, open government data initiatives are not very effective, that’s why the Pakistani government is not very transparent. The improved digital government in Pakistan may help in smooth information flow from government to citizens, citizens to government, and also within the government institutions. Consequently, the digital government in Pakistan will help in advancements of administrative activities, improve the economy, and at the same time improve transparency.

The Greek government over the last years is on the right track to achieving those pillars. First of all, in the “E-services by government” section of the pillars, Greece provides good practices, and several services are provided in the online platform of the Greek government but there are not all digitally enabled to the citizens and that is another step that needs to be taken in order to provide quality of service. Moreover, the “Use of Disruptive technologies” part of the evaluation is another good example for the Greek government. There are lots of initiatives that took place in Greece and the government is in the right direction. That also applies to the “Transparency” pillar, based on the specific sub-pillars and indicators the Greek government is on the right track. On the other side, over the last few years, it is noticed a lack of citizen engagement, with no initiatives and actions to encourage citizens to participate in the policy process or to provide feedback on common problems that they are facing. Citizen engagement is a crucial indicator of an efficient digital government, and the Greek government must provide initiatives in order to be productive.

Table 1. Pillars to measure the governments’ digital initiatives along with Pakistan and Greece comparisons
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There are several indicators to assess the performance of the digital government, such as digital economy and society index (DESI) designed by European commission (EC), United nations long-standing questionnaire for the e-government assessment. In 2017, the Tallinn Ministerial Declaration developed a monitoring tool “the digital single market vision and broader EU2020 goals”. This tool monitors and is used by the EC to provide information about the use of ICT in the public sector [3]. These indicators used some specific areas to assess the progress, but we focused on the depth version of each indicator, such as pillars and sub-pillars. In this article, we extracted the pillars and sub-pillars from the literature and policy documents and added a few of our own developed indicators, such as the use of disruptive technology in digital government initiatives. We compared two countries, one from European and the other from the Asian Continent. We also devised a scale to measure the progress of each pillar and sub-pillar, such as “provided (if service is available)”, “not provided (if service is not available)”, and “partially provided” initiatives in digital government as shown in Fig. 2. We transformed “provided (if service is available)”, “not provided (if service is not available)”, and “partially provided” into 1, 0, and 0.5 real values, respectively. We calculated the mean for each main pillar based on these values, and the results are shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2.
figure 2

Greece and Pakistan comparison based on their digital initiatives

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5 Conclusion

In this research article, we devised a framework to compare the digital initiatives of the governments. Pakistan and Greece’s initiatives in the field of electronic government are highlighted in the light of our developed framework. In light of our devised plan, a government (e.g., Pakistani and Greek) may elaborate on their weakest and strongest points towards e-government for better transparency and accountability. Other governments may also use this evaluation framework to evaluate and later optimize the futuristic view of e-government. Digital transformation for governments requires governments to consider the systemic use of disruptive technologies such as we tried to elaborate on all the key pillars of digital government. There are several other indicators used to measure the success of digital governments, such as Open Data Watch (ODIN), which provides indexes for each country based on their openness and coverage, but our proposed framework considers the 6 main pillars and several sub-pillars to evaluate the E-government. According to the ODIN score, Pakistan has a score of 43 based on openness and coverage, but Greece has a score of 60. Consequently, our study also proved, based on the GDIs framework, that Greece is much more advanced than Pakistan. In this study, we focused on which sectors of the government need to be improved for better e-government. This framework will show how each pillar and sub-pillar needs more monitoring and development to help governments move up the rankings of different indices like EDGI, DESI, and ODIN and, as a result, give their citizens the best services using digital technologies. Our developed framework is not limited to the assessment of Greece and Pakistan’s digital initiatives; the framework is applicable to other countries’ digital initiatives assessments as well. More attributes and sub-attributes related to government digital initiatives may emerge in the future, and this framework will be able to adjust for the new attributes and sub-attributes.