A smart government platform to promote strategy development in municipalities

Municipalities today face many challenges, including those caused by global issues like climate change or acute shocks like the current pandemic, mobility issues, changing demographics, and increased urbanization. Simultaneously, citizens demand better services, transparency, and inclusion when it comes to state-related services. However, municipalities do not have more financial nor staff resources available to cope with these challenges and thus require developing and monitoring strategies to manage their limited resources. Following a lean approach based on a build-measure-learn feedback loop we built a Smart Government Platform that offers to develop monitoring strategies digitally. In this study we focus on the learn phase, aiming to identify whether the platform meets the requirements of the Swiss municipalities by conducting expert interviews with municipality representatives. Interview results show current strategy development and monitoring practices hinge on cumbersome and error prone paper- or Excel-based approaches Besides, their monitoring processes are not yet KPI-based and therefore not data-driven. For these aspects, we learned that the platform has the potential to improve their practices. Interviews further revealed that smaller and medium-sized municipalities emphasized more generic obstacles to innovation on their agenda. Using digital platforms to develop and monitor strategies is not a priority for them, although they stated that it is “good to have.” Therefore, it is more relevant for us to focus on larger municipalities since their innovation processes are mature enough, and they have more resources and willingness to invest in digital platforms offering KPI-based strategy development and monitoring.