In 2023 Public Digital was asked to support an international institution studying the impact of digitisation initiatives in public finance. They were drawing together a range of data and case studies but as we worked through them it was clear that the initiatives they were looking at took widely ranging approaches to transformation and to technology. For the analysis to be useful we needed some way of classifying the approaches taken in each case study.
We know that digital is much more than the technology approach taken, but within this piece of work it was deemed useful to focus on approaches starting from the technology, and so Francis and I produced a simple taxonomy to identify some of the main themes in the technology approaches taken for each case study.
The taxonomy draws out a few dimensions of the approach. It’s deliberately simple and high-level, and we know that deep practitioners will quickly spot nuances we’ve missed, or approaches that we seem to be saying are distinct but which can actually be complimentary. But even with those caveats the response to the taxonomy among those we were working with was positive as it helped to make sense of the work they were seeing.
We also found it a useful route into talking about the trade-offs inherent in any technology decision. There’s rarely one right path – how quickly you adopt new practices, or whether you should commit to a wholesale change in your tech depends on a set of contextual decisions.
The overall analysis we were supporting is complex and will take a while to fully surface so we’ve pulled out the taxonomy work as a standalone paper which we’re pleased to publish with the support of ODI Global, making it the third working paper as part of the Digital Public Finance Hub.
You can find it there now.