Slovenia has taken important strides in strengthening its foundations for digital government investments. In areas such as value proposition approaches, procurement and GovTech strategy, practices continue to mature. Progress, however, remains uneven across the investment lifecycle. Slovenia could look to establish a strategic and cohesive whole-of-government approach for digital and ICT investments, ensuring initiatives are sustainably financed and deliver their intended benefits.
Digital Government Scan of Slovenia
Abstract
Effective investment in digital technologies and data is a key foundation for improving public services and public sector efficiency, underpinned by governments’ ability to manage these investments well across their lifecycle to realise their intended benefits. Slovenia has taken significant steps to strengthen the management of digital government investments since the 2021 OECD Digital Government Review (OECD, 2021[9]), however progress remains uneven across the investment lifecycle. The evidence collected through the 2025 Digital Government Index (DGI) demonstrates solid foundations in areas such as value proposition methods, ICT procurement guidance and standard project management, as well as a strengthened approach to GovTech collaborations. At the same time, gaps persist in areas such as project financing, risk and benefits management, ex-post evaluation, and systematic monitoring, where there has been limited progress since the 2023 DGI. Framing Slovenia’s performance through the OECD Digital Government Investment Framework (OECD, 2025[19]) highlights both the improvements made, and where Slovenia could benefit from a more cohesive and end-to-end process for digital investments.
Slovenia’s performance in the 2025 DGI demonstrates the many strong approaches and methods in place to plan, implement and oversee its digital government investments. This is evident in the following areas:
Value proposition method: Slovenia continues to perform strongly on the use of a consistent value proposition method for digital investments. In the 2025 DGI, Slovenia reports having a standardised methodology for developing the value proposition for all digital and ICT projects, reflecting practice that is well established across the OECD (reported by 89% of OECD countries). This reflects the application of the ‘Decree on the uniform methodology for the preparation and treatment of investment documentation’ (PISRS, 2025[20]), which applies to all public investments, including digital. As part of this process, digital projects above EUR 40,000 must undergo a preliminary assessment by the Council of Informatics Development (Ministry of Digital Transformation, 2022[21]) ensuring a degree of oversight at an early stage. While the method continues to be a strength, Slovenia scores 0.63, slightly below the OECD average of 0.70%, for ensuring this value proposition method covers social and financial value, where the method’s influence on prioritisation and strategic alignment remains modest.
Guidelines for digital procurement: Slovenia performs well in digital procurement. The 2025 DGI confirms that Slovenia has guidelines in place that apply to all digital projects, reflecting the practice of 64% of OECD countries. These Guidelines on procuring IT solutions (NIO, 2024[22]) help ensure minimum standards and consistency in procurement processes.
Standardised project management: Slovenia has a standard project management model for all digital and ICT projects in the 2025 DGI, a practice reported by 52% of OECD countries. While recommended rather than mandatory, the ‘The methodology of project management in the state administration for the field of information technology’ (MVPDU-IT) (NIO, 2024[23]) and its supporting guide provide a model that covers the procedural, organisational and data aspects of project management across the administration. While Slovenia scores strongly in the DGI for its project management model, it performs below the OECD average of 0.53% for having agile methodologies as part of its project management model, scoring 0.00 for this indicator in the 2025 DGI.
GovTech: Slovenia has strengthened the strategic approach to GovTech. The Digital Slovenia 2030 (Ministry of Digital Transformation, 2024[7]) and Digital Public Services Strategy 2030 (Ministry of Public Administration, 2022[4]) both emphasis the value of collaborating with start-ups and innovative SMEs for public sector digitalisation. Slovenia correspondingly scores 1.00 in the 2025 DGI for both the inclusion of GovTech collaboration as part of the country’s digital government strategy, a practice reported by 75% of OECD countries, and for having a dedicated GovTech initiative. This second category shows significant progress from a score of 0.00 in the 2023 DGI, and its aligned with most of the OECD members (75%). GovTech activity now includes participation in European Digital Innovation Hubs (DIH Slovenia, 4PDIH, DIGI-SI and SRC-EDIH (European Commission, 2025[24]), which offer experimental environments and support emerging technology testing.
Progress against the 2021 recommendations
Slovenia has made moderate progress in responding to the recommendations of the 2021 OECD Digital Government Review (OECD, 2021). The Review called for stronger use of policy levers, such as business cases, project management, procurement and budget thresholds, better alignment between digital government and wider digital agendas, and clearer financial responsibilities for the leading digital government entity.
Strategic alignment, and the positioning of digitalisation within national strategies, has seen significant improvement. The Ministry of Digital Transformation (2025[25]) now plays a strong cross-government coordinating role, and helps ensure that digital government objectives are embedded within wider economic and societal priorities.
The relationship between investments and core digital levers, such as digital identity, interoperability and cloud infrastructure, has been strengthened, including through the National Interoperability Framework (NIO, 2024[26]) and the State Cloud (DRO) (Ministry of Public Administration, 2024[27]). The related recommendation of strengthening investment in initiatives and projects that can sustain the development of a data-driven public sector and a public sector innovation culture in the civil service as a whole has, however, seen less progress, and there remains no dedicated fund for digital and ICT projects.
The previous recommendation to strengthen the use of policy levers such as value proposition mechanisms (business cases), project management, procurement of digital projects and budget thresholds for reinforced leadership and co-ordination of digital government investments across the Slovenian public sector has also seem some progress. The development of new strategies (Ministry of Digital Transformation, 2024[7]), the use of value proposition methods and procurement guidelines (NIO, 2024[23]) all indicate incremental progress, however this does not yet reflect the 2021 advice of updating these levers with whole-of government input or a whole-of-lifecycle framework.
Reflecting on these recommendations together, Slovenia has consolidated and further extended some of the foundations identified in the 2021 Digital Government Review, particularly in strategic alignment and methodological tools. Progress, however, has been more limited in areas such as funding mechanisms, system-wide risk management, assurance and ex-post evaluation. These were areas that the 2021 Review identified as central to strengthening the management and oversight of digital government investments.
Despite strong foundations in several areas, Slovenia’s digital government investments approach could benefit to build on some of the good practices highlighted above, and progress towards a more cohesive and whole-of-lifecycle process to assist the government achieve the best return on investment. Areas such as strategic planning, coherent implementation, and monitoring and oversight of digital government investments – reflecting the OECD Digital Government Investment Framework (Box 4.1) – are key investment phases where Slovenia could benefit from introducing measures.
The OECD Digital Government Investment Framework is a tool to analyse the challenges governments face in investing in the digital transformation of the public sector. It includes three pillars: strategic planning, coherent implementation, and sound monitoring and oversight. The Framework identifies the critical elements to be addressed within each pillar to strengthen the governance for digital government – enabling government to mitigate risks and exploit the potential benefits of digital transformation.
Strategic planning: essential to strengthen the governance of digital government by establishing a clear leadership, effective policy levers and coordination mechanisms to steer the public sector digital transformation. Through strategic alignment and coordination between key stakeholder, governments can improve the planning of digital government investments.
Coherent implementation: the development of digital investments allows governments to build coherence and agility in the use of digital technologies in the public sector. Governments can leverage the use of shared tools and methodologies to secure benefits realisation.
Sound monitoring and oversight: key elements of governance to foster accountability and drive performance, enabling countries to track the investments portfolio, encourage projects to be managed properly, and ensure these investments yield the intended benefits.
Source: (OECD, 2025[28])
Strategic planning for digital government investments
At the strategic planning level, Slovenia’s digital investments approach still requires advancing through several of the governance levers that enable a cohesive approach for steering digital investments across the public sector. Evidence collected from the 2025 DGI indicates that the absence of dedicated financing mechanisms may be a gap. Slovenia does not report project financing for ICT/digital investments in both the 2023 and 2025 DGI (compared with a 2025 OECD average of 0.83), with no dedicated fund or co-funding initiative for digital projects, nor any direct financial role for the Ministry of Digital Transformation in supporting investment alignment. This may limit Slovenia’s capacity to prioritise cross- or whole-of-government initiatives, or incentivise the use of shared platforms and standards.
Risk governance presents another area where further maturity of practices may provide benefit. While Slovenia has established basic risk assessment practices, these are largely decentralised and conducted by individual ministries and institutions for their own projects. While the Ministry of Digital Transformation conducts risk assessments for its own portfolio, including, for example, those projects funded through the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility (Office of the Republic of Slovenia for Recovery and Resilience, 2021[29]), Slovenia lacks a whole-of-government investment risk framework for digital initiatives, reflected in its 0.00 score for the DGI indicator assessing whether investment-specific risks are examined as part of the digital risk assessment process, compared with an OECD average of 0.49.
An important factor to consider at the strategic planning level is a country’s value proposition approach, which relies on a standardised and structured method to estimate the costs, benefits and potential risks of an initiative when developing proposals or business cases for digital projects. While Slovenia’s value proposition method is established, the method’s role in decision making has not been further developed substantially since the 2021 Review, where it scored 0.63 in the 2025 DGI, unchanged from the country’s 2023 result and below the OECD average of 0.70. Slovenia remains at the OECD average for the extent to which value propositions guide prioritisation, alignment with standards and strategic coherence. Together these limitations may reduce Slovenia’s ability to shape a cohesive, cross-government digital investments approach.
Coherent implementation
The coherent implementation pillar of the OECD Digital Government Investment Framework emphasises the need to develop and deliver digital investments in ways that build consistency and agility across the public sector. By leveraging shared tools, standards and methods, governments can support effective delivery and strengthen the realisation of benefits from digital initiatives. A key element of this pillar is a country’s approach to approval and funding. Currently, and like most OECD countries, Slovenia follows a linear, waterfall approach to project planning and funding. This current approach lacks a comprehensive, risk-based or staged approval processes, meaning that high-risk or high-value projects are not subject to different scrutiny and through iterative approaches that derisk investments. The existing approach relies primarily on the EUR 40,000 threshold for preliminary advice, however mechanisms for initiatives across investment levels or at differing levels of complexity are not included. Without a comprehensive and standard approach that takes into account differentiation across projects (see, for example, Box 4.2), a consistent approval process that is able to scale adequately with project complexity is difficult.
Project management is also a key element of a coherent and sustainable implementation approach, with standard tools and methods to support the effective delivery of investments. Slovenia lacks agile project management methodologies as part of its national project management model, compared to 52% of OECD countries that have this type of methodology. This can limit Government’s ability to adopt iterative, exploratory and more human-centred approaches for digital projects, as well as potentially hampering the early identification of risks.
In addition to the lack of comprehensive dedicated financing mechanisms discussed above, Slovenia might also consider its approach to the sustainable, long-term funding of digital projects. Slovenia has made significant strides in the development of digital public infrastructure, including the Državni računalniški oblak or State Cloud (Ministry of Public Administration, 2024[27]) and HKOM network (Ministry for Digital Transformation, 2024[30]). The DRO Next programme (Directorate for Digital Infrastructure, 2022[31]) represents a major investment in modernisation, however Slovenia has not yet clearly articulated a clear capex/opex structure for maintaining, scaling and evolving digital projects, including DPI. This warrants particular attention as DPI becomes increasingly central to public sector digitalisation and may be a key consideration in strengthening Slovenia’s approach to coherent and sustainable investment.
Although Slovenia scores strongly in the 2025 DGI for recognition of GovTech as part of the country’s broader digital government strategy, the evidence collected reveals potential gaps in the strategic dimension, where Slovenia lacks a dedicated central GovTech team (scoring 0.00 compared to the OECD average of 0.69) and dedicates limited human and financial resources to support collaboration with the GovTech ecosystem (scoring 0.29 compared to the OECD average of 0.45). This may limit Slovenia’s ability to tie emerging innovation activity to strategic investment priorities.
The United Kingdom is piloting staged funding models as part of wider reforms focused on how digital, data and technology investments are managed and funded. Following the State of Digital Government Review, which uncovered challenges such as persistent legacy systems and overly complex funding processes, HM Treasury, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and the Government Digital Service together undertook a Performance Review of Digital Spend to identify more proportionate, outcome-oriented approaches to digital funding and investments.
A central recommendation of the review is the creation of a portfolio of ‘pathfinders’, enabling the testing of new funding models that move away from purely linear, waterfall approaches and towards models that allow for more iterative, risk-sensitive arrangements. Two of the piloted approaches as part of this reform are staged funding models. One of these approaches has been developed for innovative technologies, where initial funding is based on a lighter, more speculative assessment of potential outcomes, and subsequent tranches of funding are only released when progress is demonstrated through regular reporting or ‘showcases’. The other pilot model is for active services, where funding is tethered to performance against agreed metrics, and subsequent funding is released using compressed agile business cases and regular review processes. This approach also combines ‘change and run’ funding to support products and services and employs an earned autonomy approach for business cases, where delivery progress against outcomes supports funding decisions.
Sound monitoring and oversight
The monitoring and oversight pillar encompasses the governance mechanisms that enable governments to track their investment portfolio, foster accountability, drive performance, and ensure that digital government investments deliver their intended benefits. For the 2025 DGI, Slovenia scores 0.00 across the DGI indicators assessing ex-post cost-benefit analysis, evaluation methodology and project evaluation areas, compared with OECD averages of 0.25, 0.44 and 0.30 respectively. The evidence collected through the 2025 DGI shows that Slovenia has no active monitoring system for tracking digital project progress, has no common evaluation methodology for projects and no ex-post reviews are conducted by the central digital government entity. This limits the ability of Slovenia to learn from past investments and may stifle the ability of the government to establish whether digital initiatives are delivering on their intended outcomes.
Slovenia does not have an established benefits realisation approach, meaning that benefits are neither systematically identified, nor are they assigned to accountable initiative owners, nor are they monitored over time. This stands in contrast to good practice across the OECD (see Box 4.3), where benefits management is increasingly being employed and recognised as a key factor in the effective management of digital investments.
Evidence collected through the 2025 DGI indicates that Slovenia does not possess a mechanism to provide portfolio-level visibility of digital investments. With no central mechanism or practice to produce a coherent and whole-of-government view of digital investments, it may be difficult to track cumulative risks, identify overlaps or redundancies, or ensure coherence with different strategies. This lack of visibility may reduce Slovenia’s ability to best direct investments to where they are most needed and to manage digitalisation as cohesive, cross-government effort.
The Australian government’s Digital and ICT Investment Oversight Framework (IOF) provides an example for how governments can operationalise elements of the OECD Digital Government Investments Framework by combining policies, processes and tools into a single oversight system.
A central element of Australia’s approach is the Benefits Management Policy, which sets expectations for how agencies identify, measure and govern benefits for digital and ICT investments. The policy requires benefits to be defined at the proposal stage, be linked to government priorities and tracked through project delivery and operation. The policy is supported by central guidance and templates provided by the Digital Transformation Agency, ensuring the benefits management approach is treated as part of standard practice, and not as an afterthought.
Australia also uses a staged funding approach, tying the release of funds to the completion of defined imitative milestones, and uses portfolio-level tools such as the Digital Investment Overview and the Major Digital Projects Report to support visibility over the investment pipeline and active projects.
Based on these findings, and building on the progress made since 2021 and identified in the 2025 DGI, the Government could consider incorporating the strategic objective below into its new digitalisation approach, which could be achieved by addressing the associated recommendations:
Slovenia could seek to establish a strategic and cohesive whole-of-government governance model for digital investments that ensures sustainable financing, coherent implementation and systematic benefits realisation across the investment lifecycle.
Recommendation 7:
The government could move towards establishing a cross-government benefits management approach for digital investments, extending the current focus on ex-ante value propositions into a full benefits lifecycle, from initial identification to ex-post review. Slovenia could consider an approach in which major digital proposals are required to define clear, measurable benefits aligned with digital government and other relevant strategies, identify accountable owners responsible for realising these outcomes, and set out mechanisms for monitoring and reporting progress.
Recommendation 8:
The government could introduce staged and risk-based funding mechanisms for digital investments to support more coherent and sustainable implementation. Under a staged approach, funding could be released in tranches, with each stage contingent on evidence of feasibility, value, and alignment with intended outcomes.
Recommendation 9:
The government could consider establishing clear capex and opex funding models best suited for digital initiatives and projects, distinguishing between one-off investment costs and ongoing operational costs, to ensure sustainable and effective investments. This could include considering cross-government cost-sharing arrangements, dedicated budget lines for maintenance, resilience and innovation, and integration with any benefits management approach that is developed.
Recommendation 10:
The government could consider developing a whole-of-government risk framework or model for digital investments to ensure consistent identification and mitigation of financial, delivery and technical risks across ministries and projects.