Through an ongoing research project with Sundsvall Municipality, the research team has published the first report. The findings show that there is a wide-spread tendency towards not using investments as a means for funding digital initiatives. Instead of including digital infrastructural elements in investment budgets, this is instead pushed towards operating expense. The result is that digital initiatives need to fund the entire technology stack for prioritization, resulting in a tendency for sub-optimization, decrease in the pace of adoption and utilization and fragmentation.
The report is available here, along with a think-piece. Hopefully the findings will lead to a debate that results in an increase in the use of investments as a means to fund digital infrastructure in the public sector.