Blockchain remains a hot topic for digital transformation and innovation. In the private sector, blockchain has demonstrated disruptive potential through proven use cases. However, despite strong interest and greater awareness, blockchain has had minimal impact on the public sector, where few projects have moved beyond small pilots. At the same time, there is a growing scepticism and cynicism about public sector blockchain. This paper seeks to understand why this is, by analysing the latest research in the area and identifying and analysing government experiences with successful and unsuccessful projects. It provides early findings on beliefs, characteristics, and practices related to government blockchain projects and the organisations that seek to implement them, with a focus on factors contributing to success or non-success. Although blockchain has yet to affect government in the ways that early hype predicted, government decision makers will nonetheless need to understand and monitor this emerging technology.
Tag: Working Paper
OECD publications are always a team effort but this, the second piece to have my name on it, is hugely down to the work of my colleague Charlotte. Unfortunately she’s been away from the team since I joined so my contribution here was to pick up the thread of her research and get the paper to completion.
If you’re interested in this subject you may want to take a look at the fuller report we published in November 2019 or the series of seminars I hosted with the Azerbaijani government in May 2024 which unpacks the Framework as a set of presentations.
What’s the TL;DR?
This Working Paper argues that governments need to go further in putting the collection, processing, sharing and reuse of their data (the Government Data Value Cycle) at the heart of how they think about digital transformation. It’s a guide to how governments can invest in public servants in order to recognise and use data as a core component of the modern state.
Plenty of governments have pockets of good practice but the challenge is to scale those into whole-of-government approaches that are well supported internally as well as finding favour with the public. This is the vision of the ‘data driven public sector’ (DDPS).
The paper discusses three areas of opportunity:
Continue readingI’m really pleased with how this paper came together. It’s the first thing I’ve written at the OECD, and the first ‘academic’ work that’s been published in my name.
What’s the TL;DR?
This paper exists because the OECD more broadly is interested in this idea of “citizen well-being”. There’s a cross-cutting horizontal project about it with different teams writing up how their work is important to the concept.
And we’re no different. So what impact can digital government have on citizen well-being? Well, my argument in the paper is that there are three characteristics of government that create outcomes that improve well-being. They are responsive, protective and trustworthy:
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