The rankings were released at the OECD’s flagship E-Leaders annual meeting that was held virtually.
South Korea ranked no.1 among 33 nations that were surveyed for “Digital Government Index (DGI): 2019”.
According to OECD, the DGI measures the maturity level of digital government strategies among its member and partner nations based on evidence collected via the Survey on Digital Government 1.0.
The organisation claims that its findings indicate the promising yet modest progress made towards strong digital governments. Its rankings are said to encourage governments to ramp up efforts to strategically use digital technologies and also data for user-driven public services.
Digital Government Index evaluates countries across six dimensions. These include digital by design, government as a platform, data-driven public sector, open by default, user-driven, and proactiveness.
The UK is said to have secured high marks for its work related to being digital by design, being user- and data-driven, and also for its government as a platform work.
Its composite score is 0.736, just below that of South Korea, whose score in the OECD DGI rankings being 0.742.
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OECD had set a composite score threshold of 0.5 for the six dimensions.
For digital by design, the UK ranked sixth with a score of 0.67.
In the data-driven public sector, the UK stood first with a 0.69 score. For the government as platform, it bagged the first rank as well with a score of 0.9.
Its rank for the open by default dimension is second with a score of 0.85.
The UK ranked third for the user-driven parameter with a score of 0.78. However, for proactiveness, the country ranked 11 with a score of 0.51.
GDS team stated: “This top ranking is something we are really proud of at the Government Digital Service (GDS), and it reflects the hard work of teams across GDS and the thousands of digital, data and technology (DDaT) professionals across the function.”
Apart from being ranked second in OECD’s DGI Index, the UK is also presently ranked seventh in the world in the 2020 United Nations (UN) E-Government Survey and first in the Open Data Barometer.
