Digital government: what it is, how it works and who does it best

Digital government is the use of digital technology and data to change how the state works and serves people, not only to move paper forms online. The OECD defines it as ‘the use of digital technologies, as an integrated part of governments’ modernisation strategies, to create public value’. In practice it rests on shared systems for identity, data exchange and payments, on services designed around the people who use them, and on rules that keep those systems safe and fair.

This guide explains the term, how it differs from e-government, the building blocks, how countries are measured and what has worked and failed in more than a dozen countries. It draws on IQGov’s ranking of all 193 UN member states, built from the UN E-Government Survey 2024, and on our own reporting.

What digital government means

An official definition comes from the OECD’s Recommendation of the Council on Digital Government Strategies, which the OECD Council adopted on 15 July 2014. It says digital government relies on an ecosystem of ‘government actors, non-governmental organisations, businesses, citizens’ associations and individuals’ that supports the production of and access to data, services and content through interactions with the government.

The same text defines digital technologies broadly: the internet, mobile technologies and devices, and data analytics used to improve the collection, exchange, analysis and presentation of digital content, ‘including for the development of services and apps’.

Three ideas separate digital government from simply having websites. First, services start from what people need rather than from how ministries are organised: the first point of the UK’s Service Standard is ‘Understand users and their needs’. Second, governments build common components once and reuse them: Estonia’s X-Road lets public and private information systems ‘link up and function in harmony’. Third, data is managed as a public asset, which is why the OECD scores countries on being ‘data-driven’ and ‘open by default’.

The UN now uses the same language. The UN E-Government Survey 2024 describes itself as ‘a comprehensive assessment of the digital government landscape across all 193 Member States’, and introduces a Digital Government Model Framework that gives countries ‘a comprehensive road map’.

Digital government vs e-government

The two terms are often used as synonyms, and the UN still calls its flagship report the E-Government Survey. The OECD draws a line between them. In its definition, e-government ‘refers to the use by the governments of information and communication technologies (ICTs), and particularly the Internet, as a tool to achieve better government’. Digital government goes further: technology is part of how the state modernises, and the aim is ‘to create public value’.

Put simply, e-government puts what the state already does online; digital government asks what the state should do differently because the technology exists. The difference shows up in five places:

• Starting point: e-government begins with existing procedures; digital government begins with users, as in the UK Service Standard point ‘Solve a whole problem for users’.
• Architecture: e-government is often built agency by agency; digital government favours shared platforms such as GOV.UK Pay, which has served more than 600 organisations across central and local government.
• Data: e-government sends documents; digital government connects registers, as Estonia’s X-Road does, with 2.2 billion transactions a year by e-Estonia’s count.
• Measurement: e-government counts services online; the OECD measures maturity across six dimensions, from ‘digital by design’ to ‘proactive’.
• Openness: the OECD asks governments to make ‘open and inclusive processes, accessibility, transparency and accountability’ among the main goals of their digital strategies.

The building blocks

Most advanced digital governments rest on a small set of shared systems, often called digital public infrastructure; IQGov’s analysis The state as a platform looks at how they fit together. The World Bank reports that between 16 and 20 per cent of economies established a government cloud, enterprise architecture, interoperability framework or service bus between its 2022 and 2025 surveys.

Digital identity. A trusted way to prove who you are online comes first. In the World Bank’s GovTech Maturity Index 2025, 59 per cent of economies reported using digital ID for identification and online services. In Estonia, 99 per cent of residents have an ID card, which is also used for digital signatures, i-Voting and e-prescriptions. EU member states are due to offer a digital identity wallet ‘to every citizen, resident and business by the end of 2026’; IQGov’s EUDI wallet tracker follows each country.

Data exchange and interoperability. Estonia’s X-Road ‘provides unified and secure data exchange between private and public sector organisations’, and all outgoing data is digitally signed and encrypted. India’s government describes its identity, payments and data exchange as connected through ‘interoperable public rails’.

Payments. India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) processed 21.70 billion transactions in January 2026, and 691 banks are live on it. Brazil’s instant payment system Pix recorded almost 80 billion transactions in 2025 and moved more than R$35 trillion, according to Brazil’s finance ministry. For payments to the state itself, the UK’s GOV.UK Pay has handled nearly £10 billion across almost 1,800 services in its first ten years. IQGov has covered GOV.UK Pay at ten and the politics of Pix.

Single portals and service design. Brazil’s gov.br had 175 million active accounts and 5,179 digital services in May 2026, and one gov.br account opens services from the public health system (SUS) to enrolment for the national secondary-school exam (ENEM). Rwanda’s IremboGov portal had 223 services, and applications rose from 5.9 million in 2022 to 8.4 million in 2023, according to the research group Cenfri. See One front door: Rwanda’s Irembo and Kenya’s eCitizen.

Cloud and shared platforms. Shared infrastructure can keep a state running in a crisis. In February 2022, Ukraine’s parliament passed a law allowing government and private-sector data to move to the cloud, followed by a plan to back up registers including the population register and tax payment records. The trade-off is dependence on a few large suppliers, which IQGov examines in Who owns the government cloud?

Data governance. Rules on who may see what matter as much as the systems. Estonia’s Data Tracker is meant to give citizens ‘a clear overview of the operations performed with their data’ on the state portal eesti.ee. The World Bank found a rise in the number of countries with a dedicated data governance entity (24 per cent), a data protection authority (13 per cent) and a digital signature platform (17 per cent).

How countries are measured

The best-known yardstick is the UN’s E-Government Development Index (EGDI), published in the UN E-Government Survey; the 2024 edition is the thirteenth. The EGDI is ‘calculated as the average of three independent component indices’: the Online Services Index (OSI), the Telecommunications Infrastructure Index (TII) and the Human Capital Index (HCI).

In the 2024 survey, Denmark, Estonia and Singapore led the ranking of the 193 UN member states. The global average EGDI value was 0.6382, and 76 countries were in the very high EGDI group, with Mauritius and South Africa the first African countries to join it. The UN reported the proportion of the population lagging in digital government development falling from 45.0 per cent in 2022 to 22.4 per cent in 2024.

IQGov’s government index shows all 193 UN member states from the UN E-Government Survey 2024, with each country’s EGDI score and its components, and every country has a profile page, such as Denmark or Estonia.

The OECD’s Digital Government Index (DGI) was approved in 2018 as a measurement tool to monitor progress against the 2014 Recommendation. It scores countries on six dimensions: digital by design, data-driven, government as a platform, open by default, user-driven and proactiveness. South Korea came first in the 2023 edition with a composite score of 0.935, according to its interior ministry. The 2025 edition benchmarks 42 countries; Korea scored 0.95, Australia 0.88 and Portugal 0.86, and the average rose from 0.61 in 2023 to 0.70.

The World Bank’s GovTech Maturity Index (GTMI) 2025 covers 197 economies with 48 indicators in four areas: core government systems, public service delivery, digital citizen engagement and GovTech enablers. The Bank says the GTMI ‘is not a ranking’; it sorts economies into groups A to D, and found that progress since 2022 ‘has been positive but uneven’.

The three measure different things. The UN index combines online services with telecommunications and education; the OECD index looks at policies and institutions in a smaller group of countries; the World Bank index records the systems governments report having. A country can do well on one and less well on another, so it is worth reading them together.

Digital government examples from every region

Estonia, Europe. One of the three leaders of the UN’s 2024 ranking, Estonia runs public services on the X-Road data exchange, which e-Estonia says supports over 3,800 e-services. See Estonia’s e-residency record.

Denmark, Europe. Denmark had the highest EGDI value in the world for the fourth consecutive survey in 2024. Its national eID, MitID, is what residents use for public self-service, and Danish law requires citizens and businesses to be able to receive Digital Post, while those who cannot communicate digitally can still receive and send mail in a non-digital way.

Singapore, Asia. In 2024 Singapore was, for the first time, the top EGDI performer in Asia. In figures the agency dates to March 2021, its Singpass digital identity had 5 million users, more than 4.2 million of whom used the app, and gave access to over 2,700 services across 800 government agencies and businesses. See Singpass and passkeys.

South Korea, Asia. Korea ranked fourth in the UN’s 2024 survey and first for online services, and first in the OECD’s 2025 index for the third consecutive time. It also shows the risk of concentration: a fire at the National Information Resources Service in Daejeon in September 2025 halted 647 government systems, including the Government24 portal.

India, Asia. By March 2026 more than 144 crore (1.44 billion) Aadhaar identity numbers had been generated, and over 2,707 crore authentication transactions were carried out in 2024–25, according to India’s Press Information Bureau. The same source says the DigiLocker document wallet had 67.63 crore users on 5 March 2026.

Brazil, Americas. Besides the gov.br single login and portal, Brazil’s Pix reached 148 million people who had made or received a payment, according to the finance ministry’s summary of a central bank report published in August 2026.

Uruguay, Americas. Under its Trámites en Línea programme (2015 to 2020), Uruguay’s digital government agency AGESIC reports that 100 per cent of state services can be started digitally and 93 per cent can be completed fully online.

Ukraine, Europe. The Ministry of Digital Transformation said in October 2025 that over 23 million Ukrainians use Diia, which offers more than 70 digital public services and 33 digital documents. See The app that would not go down.

Rwanda, Africa. Rwanda’s state information agency RISA says over 50 per cent of government services are digitised, or 223 services on IremboGov, as reported by Cenfri in October 2024. In the same continent, Mauritius and South Africa became the first African countries in the UN’s very high EGDI group in 2024.

United Arab Emirates, Middle East. UAE PASS, ‘the unified national digital identity’, has exceeded 12 million registered users, Digital Dubai said in July 2026. The UAE and Saudi Arabia were both runners-up in the UN’s highest rating class in 2024. See The Gulf’s government platforms grow up.

Australia, Oceania. Australia was second in the OECD’s 2025 index with a score of 0.88, and its myGov account links services such as the Australian Taxation Office, Centrelink, Medicare and the National Disability Insurance Scheme to one account.

Benefits and risks

The benefits are reach, speed and reuse. A shared platform means each body does not have to rebuild the same thing: users of GOV.UK Pay value ‘not having to procure their own provider’. The OECD argues that technology can also make governments more open, participatory and innovative. The risks are just as real.

Exclusion and the digital divide. The ITU estimates that 2.2 billion people remain offline (Facts and Figures 2025). The UN found that in 2024 none of the low-income countries had reached the global average EGDI value. The OECD asks governments to address ‘digital divides’ and avoid new forms of ‘digital exclusion’; keeping a non-digital route, as Denmark does for Digital Post, is one answer.

Privacy. Joining up data can turn into surveillance. On 5 February 2020 the District Court of The Hague ordered the Netherlands to stop using SyRI, a welfare-fraud risk system, because it violated international human rights norms, basing its review on the rights to privacy and to protection of personal data.

Cybersecurity and resilience. The EU cybersecurity agency ENISA found that across 2025 ‘the most targeted sector remains public administration in 32% of cases’. Physical failure matters too, as Korea’s data-centre fire showed.

Failed IT projects. The UK’s GOV.UK Verify identity service was adopted by only 19 government services and 3.9 million people signed up, against 25 million users forecast to be active by 2020, according to Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee as reported by Global Government Forum; it was closed in 2023. IQGov looks at the lessons in Breaking the megaproject and at its successor in GOV.UK One Login and passkeys. The OECD recommends articulating the value proposition for all projects above a certain budget threshold, and early testing of prototypes with end-users.

Vendor lock-in. In its July 2025 cloud market decision, the UK Competition and Markets Authority found that egress fees to move data between cloud providers are a key commercial barrier, and that such barriers ‘lock customers into their initial choice of provider’. The UK government’s open standards principles say open standards can help ‘avoid vendor lock-in to a specific piece of technology, or supplier’.

How governments get started

Set a strategy and the rules. The OECD recommends that governments develop and implement digital government strategies, and that procurement and contracting rules be updated ‘to make them compatible with modern ways of developing and deploying digital technology’. The UN’s Digital Government Model Framework offers a road map for planning, implementing and assessing such initiatives.

Adopt a service standard. The UK’s Service Standard ‘helps teams to create and run great public services’ and sets 14 points, among them:

• Understand users and their needs, and make sure everyone can use the service.
• Have a multidisciplinary team and use agile ways of working.
• Create a secure service which protects users’ privacy.
• Make new source code open, and use and contribute to open standards, common components and patterns.
• Define what success looks like and publish performance data.

Build a digital service team. The UK’s Government Digital Service calls itself ‘the digital centre of government’. IQGov has reported on similar teams at state level in Virginia’s digital service and on portals built from scratch in Nigeria and Malawi.

Reuse before you build. Common platforms for login, payments and notifications let each new service start further ahead; GOV.UK Pay is one example. Open standards keep those platforms interoperable through open protocols.

Measure outcomes, not launches. The World Bank found that when it comes to tracking actual use of digital systems, ‘responses revealed a significant need to improve this area’. Publishing performance data, one of the points of the UK standard, lets the public see whether services work.