Digital transformation constitutes one of the most important innovations at the local level of government. It is expected to fundamentally reshape the local delivery of public services, the structures of public administration, and governance in Europe in general. Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the fundamental importance of well-prepared digital administration. In many countries, local government is the most significant tier of public service delivery, ensuring proximity to citizens and playing a key role in digital transformation. Against this background, it is a matter of concern that in current comparative research concerning the digital transformation of state and administration, local levels of government have been insufficiently investigated. Indeed, no systematic, cross-countries comparative knowledge is available regarding the state of implementation and the effects of digital transformation at the local tier of government in Europe. The DIGITAL research project aims to remedy those deficits.

Two key research questions will be addressed:

• What are the dynamics, scale, and pace of digital transformation in European local governments? Is the change radical and revolutionary or, on the contrary, incremental and evolutionary, and can regional differences be identified?

• What effects does digital transformation in these organizations have, especially in terms of their output (service delivery, organization, processes, and resources), outcomes (performance and accountability), and impact (acceptance by the citizens, governance, emerging areas of tension)?

To answer these questions, data will be collected on all municipalities in the 46 member states of the Council of Europe.  

Case Studies 

To accompany the quantitative surveys, comparative case studies will be conducted in selected municipalities forming part of the extended survey sample. The case studies will be about municipalities with different administrative cultures in order to capture the country-specific variance in local administrative systems. The case study approach relies on field research methods, semi-structured expert interviews, and focus groups conducted with local chief executives, chief information officers (CIOs), department heads, staff representatives, and staff members. Building on the interim results from the quantitative research, the aim is to gain deeper insights into the internal processes and actor constellations of the respective digital transformation paths by recording the organizational realities in the municipalities.

Survey

In addition to the qualitative case studies, the DIGILOG project will be based on two quantitative forms of data collection: a web crawler for analyzing municipal websites and a survey among managers of European municipal administrations.

The survey has several objectives. Primarily, it will collect information on the status of the external and internal digital transformation of the municipal administrations surveyed, from which an index will be created that will be valid throughout Europe. Externally, the focus will mainly be on the digital services offered by the administrations. These will be assigned to different maturity levels according to an established social science model, ranging from providing information and options for digital communication with administrative employees to the fully digital and seamless handling of administrative processes. Internally, the project will cover, among other things, the technical equipment of administrations, forms of internal communication, data management, and the automation of processes and routine decisions.

Web Crawling and Scraping

Web crawling is a vital component of the DIGILOG project. In addition to the surveys, automatic crawling and analysis of the municipal websites will be part of the quantitative analysis. The results of the data analysis described below will be displayed on a dashboard within a monitoring platform. In addition, website URL lists and email addresses for the surveys, if not already provided, will also be completed via crawling public data sources.

The monitoring platform will be based on three main components which will interact with each other: web crawling, data storage, and the subsequent data analysis. With this platform, the political communities' websites will be monitored for the duration of the project. In order to cope with the amount of data, different approaches will allow selective crawling while losing as little information as possible. One project goal is to research and implement the most efficient method for this task.

Data storage will rely on two different database systems, a relational and a document-oriented system. Database keys and standardized information will be stored in the relational system, the respective documents of the website, and the results of the analysis in the document-oriented system. Finally, indications of digital transformation (e.g., mention of selected services or keywords) will be extracted and evaluated. Various methods used in natural language processing (NLP), a subfield of machine learning, will be used for this purpose.

The analysis, in turn, will provide effective feedback to the intelligent crawler, which will contribute to its continuous improvement. The quality of the analysis will be safeguarded by domain experts who will interpret the results and classify them for the business, political, and administrative sciences.