Governments can improve their agility and policy impact by putting digital transformation at the heart of modernisation efforts. The OECD Digital Government Index (DGI) benchmarks digital government policies and their implementation. It includes six dimensions: 1) digital by design; 2) data-driven public sector; 3) government as a platform; 4) open by default; 5) user-driven; and 6) proactiveness.
The average DGI score for Southeast Asia (SEA) countries was 0.37 out of 1 at the end of 2023 (Figure 5.1). This is somewhat below the average across OECD Member countries of 0.61. The SEA countries with the highest scores on the DGI are Singapore (0.62), Indonesia (0.61), Thailand (0.48) and Viet Nam (0.43), which score above the SEA average. These countries show more balanced efforts across dimensions, except in proactiveness and open by default. By contrast, OECD countries with higher DGI scores generally take a more comprehensive approach, ensuring strong foundations for digital government across the six dimensions of the index. Notably, Singapore’s and Indonesia’s DGI scores are slightly above the OECD average and some OECD countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Conversely, SEA countries that scored below the SEA regional average generally have a more unbalanced performance across dimensions, scoring substantially higher on some dimensions than others.
Across the six dimensions of the DGI, SEA countries obtained the highest average score in digital by design (0.60) (Figure 5.2). This assesses governments’’ capacity to use digital technologies and data to re-engineer public sector processes, simplify procedures and create new channels to engage with stakeholders. The higher regional performance on this dimension underlines the priority given by SEA countries to digital government initiatives, alongside strengthening digital investments, skills, talent and service delivery. In this dimension, Indonesia (0.96), Singapore (0.76), Viet Nam (0.72), and Thailand (0.71) performed higher than the regional average. This was due in part to the maturity of their strategic frameworks, such as Singapore's Digital Government Blueprint, Indonesia’s Master Plan for Digital Government (SPBE) 2018-2025, Thailand’s Digital Government Development Plan 2023-2027, and Viet Nam’s Strategy for Development of E-Government Towards Digital Government 2021-2025.
The lowest average scores across SEA countries were in two dimensions: proactiveness (0.23) and open by default (0.30). Proactiveness (Figure 5.3) assesses governments’ capacity to anticipate user needs, including the provision of services. Indonesia (0.63) had the highest score in this dimension. Lower scores suggest a need to focus on improving use of data and artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver public policies and services more proactively. Open by default (Online Figure D.2.1) assesses the availability of policies, tools and mechanisms for transparency, accessibility and sharing of information to foster public engagement in policymaking and service design. Thailand (0.48), Singapore (0.46), Indonesia (0.37) and Viet Nam (0.35) had the highest scores among SEA countries on this dimension. Scores in this dimension indicate room for improvement in the SEA region, supporting access, security, availability and re-use of open government data for more transparent and participatory government practices (Online Figure D.2.1; see also the sections on the OURdata Index).
