Organisational Approach to Government Digital Transformation: Comparing the UK and Sweden

This article considers the emergence of e-government in the UK and Sweden by conducting a structured document analysis of relevant government reports. The aim of the research was to examine differences in planning practice – i.e. how change was planned and different different in both states. The key finding was that the focus of digital transformation shifted over time from digitalizing services to digitalizing internal departmental processes. The governments enacted change by and supporting new roles and agencies deemed able to drive change. In so doing, actively both sought to balance macro-social and micro-social shaping forces. However, the ‘macro’ rationales and micro-level practices for digitalizing services also showed some differences of focus in each case.