Digitally Transforming Electronic Governments into Smart Governments: SMARTGOV, an Extended Maturity Model

Smart government aims to provide intelligent and agile personalized public services to government stakeholders. Over the past few years, governments seek to employ innovative technologies, such as blockchain, analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, robotics process automation, and machine learning (ML), to improve citizens’ experiences and quality of life as well as government decision-making processes. They also aim to increase the efficiency of business processes and to transform the delivery of public services. However, the extant e-government literature lacks an inclusive digital government maturity model that can be used as a unified reference for guiding public organizations through the journey to smart government. Accordingly, the main aim of this paper is to develop a smart government maturity model by extending and revising the extant literature related to e-government. The developed model is then used to empirically evaluate the smart government initiative in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). We applied the model on 41 UAE federal governments’ websites/portals and measured their maturity level using 73 indicators. The findings indicate that the UAE is quite advanced with regard to smart government, as the majority of governmental entities scored “High” and above on the use of innovative and disruptive technologies in various domains. The smart government maturity model proved its efficacy and value in evaluating the UAE's smart government initiative.