Personalised public services are viewed as a new frontier of digital government transformation, driven by advances in artificial intelligence and inspired by the success of personalisation in the private sector. Yet, directly replicating commercial models without accounting for public sector specificities risks undermining public values. Furthermore, the emerging literature on public service personalisation suffers from conceptual fuzziness, which hinders both service design and further research. This study makes a theoretical contribution by developing a taxonomy of personalisation comprising 9 dimensions and 25 characteristics. Its usefulness in enhancing conceptual clarity, untangling different forms of personalisation and accounting for public sector specificities is demonstrated through empirical cases, illustrating how the taxonomy can support both research and service design in the context of citizen-centric digital government. The taxonomy design process also identifies new directions for future research on a topic likely to gain relevance in the years ahead.
Discretion is a central concept in street-level bureaucracy, yet its role is evolving in the context of digital transformation in public administration. This paper examines how discretion is reflected in policy discourse and organizational practices within Dutch public service organizations. The study draws on focus group discussions with public employees from municipalities and national government agencies involved in policy development and digital transformation initiatives. The data were analyzed using qualitative text analysis supported by large language models. The findings show that discretion is shaped by the interaction between external mandates, organizational visions, and implementation practices. Legal frameworks, accountability mechanisms, and political priorities continue to define the boundaries within which discretion can be exercised. At the same time, organizations increasingly emphasize citizen-centered service delivery and the importance of professional judgment. However, translating these ambitions into practice remains challenging due to digital infrastructures, standardized procedures, and organizational silos. The study highlights how discretion in digitally transforming public administrations emerges from the interaction between legal, technological, and organizational factors.
Proactive public services (PPS) - services initiated by public authorities without prior request - are increasingly promoted as a cornerstone of human-centric digital government in Europe. Yet what “proactivity” means in practice remains conceptually unstable. Drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews across 12 EU Member States, this study examines how practitioners interpret PPS and the governance consequences of conceptual ambiguity. Findings show that conceptual ambiguity is not merely semantic but operationally consequential. Across interviews, most respondents demonstrated uncertainty in distinguishing between digitization and proactivity, automation and proactivity, and personalization and proactivity, leading to three recurring patterns: under-recognition of existing proactive practices, over-classification of digitized services as proactive, and the equation of proactivity with full automation. These divergent interpretations affect service prioritization, funding, and comparability across jurisdictions. We argue that proactivity should be understood as a service initiation logic - authority-initiated delivery - rather than as a technology, delivery channel, or automation level. Failing to make this distinction risks reinforcing technology-first reform logic, overlooking existing innovations, and distorting governance decisions. By introducing the proactivity interpretation gap, the study contributes to digital government research by highlighting how conceptual ambiguity shapes service classification, governance decisions, and public sector innovation trajectories.
Many OGD-based applications play a key role in making public data usable, yet most are short-lived because their sustainability hinges on the continued engagement and connections of independent developers. This study investigates how developer motivation and networking shape the long-term sustainability of such applications. Drawing on an exploratory case study of two mobile OGD-based applications that have been maintained for over a decade, we analyze the temporal evolution of motivational drivers and networking dynamics. Our findings show that sustainability depends not only on strong initial intrinsic motivation, but also on later obligation-based drivers, predictable maintenance demands, data-access conditions, and the changing strength of external ties. We derive six propositions that extend prior research by highlighting the temporal fragility of developer engagement and the conditional role of networking as a multiplier. Practically, the study offers insights for independent developers seeking to manage maintenance burdens and sustain long-term involvement in OGD-based initiatives.
Research on digital government often treats the use of online public services as a uniform phenomenon, overlooking how patterns of engagement may vary across service domains and levels of digital completion. This paper examines how gender, conditioned by race, education and income shape the use of digital public services in Brazil. Drawing on nationally representative microdata from the ICT Households Survey 2025, it uses weighted statistical models to analyze both broader forms of digital public service use and fully online service completion. The study distinguishes between two groups of services: care-related services (health, education, and transportation/urban services) and financial/administrative services (personal documents, labor/social security, taxes/fees, and justice). The findings suggest that gender inequalities in digital government are domain-specific and sensitive to how digital engagement is measured. Women are more likely to use care-related digital services, while men are more likely to use financial-administrative services. Across models, education and income remain the strongest predictors of digital public service use. The paper contributes to the digital government literature by providing evidence from Brazil that digital inequality is shaped not only by material resources, but also by gendered patterns of interaction with the state, and that these inequalities may vary according to both policy domain and level of digital engagement.
