Abstract
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With a growing number of digital services in cities and other local environments, one of the biggest questions is how to contextualize progress made and milestones that yet have to be achieved. Trying to make progress in a very different and new situation, which DT generates, is hard when cities cannot define where they are relatively to the progress that has been made elsewhere (Eaves, 2018).
Many European urban municipalities detected a need for a rapid DT and its administration that would encourage broader development in the digital field to yield its benefits, such as user friendly and citizen-centric digital services, a higher quality of life, and better environment for businesses.
Except for two cities, Ljubljana and Maribor, Slovenian urban municipalities have less than 50.000 inhabitants (OECD city size classification, 2012). In recent years it has been shown that they can achieve more with better cooperation among them (one such example of cities cooperation is the initiative of 11 urban municipalities to draw European funds under the Integrated Territorial Investment Mechanism from the ERDF and the Cohesion Fund. By April 2020 54 projects were approved; https://www.zmos.si/english/#urban-development---iti).
Due to the small size of the urban municipalities, their proximity and large population migration (both permanent migration and daily migration for work and school), it is necessary to build digital solutions and services for citizens together and in a coordinated way. Furthermore, with the possibility of rapid introduction and implementation of digital solutions, the cooperation and exchange between different urban municipalities' administrations has proved to be a tremendous advantage in the fight against COVID 19.
To achieve these goals the right approach to DT must be taken. As a first step towards successful DT implementation a thorough self-assessment of digital maturity is needed. In Slovenian urban municipalities, this first step will be conducted through the European Commission's Intelligent Cities Challenge (ICC) project, the tailored support programme of coaching, facilitation and inspiration launched by the European Commission. The ICC programme brings together a community of cities with untapped potential, clear aspirations, and strong commitment to grow. Using digital and advanced technology, these cities will transform their performance, providing a higher quality of life for citizens and improving the competitive environment of businesses. From the DT point of view, the ICC project envisages the implementation of self-assessment of digital maturity in the field of “Government services and Social connectivity”, which include digitising public services, digital connectivity, open data, and citizen participation and local industry. The obtained results of the self-assessment will enable a comparative analysis of digital maturity of participating urban municipalities and cities and the examination of the reasons for the digital maturity diversity.
In our research, the self-assessment of digital maturity of eleven Slovenian urban municipalities will be studied and the results analysed. Since it will be based on the fixed assessment method, provided by the ICC, we will be able to monitor the impact of the future developments and improvements of the digital maturity through future repeated assessments. At the same time, we will suggest a feedback loop of digital maturity assessment by corelating the digital transformation activities with maturity level increase and provide a circle of improvement of the model itself.
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