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Digitalization of swedish government agencies: a perspective through the lens of a software development census

Published: 27 May 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Software engineering is at the core of the digitalization of society. Ill-informed decisions can have major consequences, as made evident in the 2017 government crisis in Sweden, originating in a data breach caused by an outsourcing deal made by the Swedish Transport Agency. Many Government Agencies (GovAgs) in Sweden are rapidly undergoing a digital transition, thus it is important to overview how widespread, and mature, software development is in this part of the public sector. We present a software development census of Swedish GovAgs, complemented by document analysis and a survey. We show that 39.2% of the GovAgs develop software internally, some matching the number of developers in large companies. Our findings suggest that the development largely resembles private sector counterparts, and that established best practices are implemented. Still, we identify improvement potential in the areas of strategic sourcing, openness, collaboration across GovAgs, and quality requirements. The Swedish Government has announced the establishment of a new digitalization agency next year, and our hope is that the software engineering community will contribute its expertise with a clear voice.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICSE-SEIS '18: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society
May 2018
108 pages
ISBN:9781450356619
DOI:10.1145/3183428
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 27 May 2018

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Author Tags

  1. census
  2. digital government
  3. public sector
  4. software engineering

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  • (2022)Structural modelling for assessing the effectiveness of system for countering legalization of illicit moneyJOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES10.14254/2071-8330.2022/15-3/1515:3(215-233)Online publication date: 2022
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