Digitalization of Public Administration: Conceptual Foundations, Institutional Change, and Implementation Policy

Abstract

Public administration digitalization has progressed from technology focused automation to governance centered transformation, where digital tools reshape institutional design, integrated service delivery, and accountability. Contemporary models stress interoperability, lawful data reuse, and trust infrastructure as prerequisites for sustainable scaling, while value based approaches frame digital public services through rights protection, inclusion, and resilience. The goal of this study is to systematize the evolutionary phases of public administration digitalization and to compare the conceptual foundations of digital government in EU countries and Ukraine, emphasizing institutional change and implementation policy. The study applies qualitative policy synthesis and comparative institutional reasoning, organizing key policy narratives into a phase typology and a milestone based comparison interpreted through governance architecture, sequencing, and capacity building. The findings identify five phases: informatization, e government, digital government, platform and ecosystem government, and value based resilient digital government. Across these phases, the dominant logic shifts from agency centric efficiency to whole of government coordination and data enabled public value creation, which increases the importance of legal, organizational, and data governance alignment. The EU pathway is marked by shared principles and coordinated commitments that prioritize user centricity, the once only principle, and target driven steering supported by monitoring mechanisms. Ukraine demonstrates accelerated implementation through a unified service ecosystem and interoperability infrastructure that enable data reuse and reduce repetitive administrative requests, while remaining embedded in a broader public administration reform agenda. The results suggest that sustainable digitalization requires co development of institutional design, legal interoperability, and trust infrastructure alongside service expansion, with performance management focused on outcomes, inclusion, and resilience rather than output counts.