⚡ Quick Summary
Published by OECD Publishing, this report is the first OECD Digital Government Outlook, approved and declassified by the OECD Public Governance Committee on 8 June 2026. It assesses digital government across 36 OECD Members and 8 accession candidate countries using the 2025 OECD Digital Government Index (DGI) and the Open, Useful and Re-usable Data (OURdata) Index, structured by the six dimensions of the OECD Digital Government Policy Framework: digital by design, data-driven public sector, government as a platform, open by default, user-driven and proactiveness.
Its central argument is that governments have built real digital foundations – shared infrastructure, interoperable systems and open data frameworks – but have not translated them into consistent operational practice. The DGI average rose from 0.61 in 2023 to 0.70 in 2025 and the OURdata Index from 0.48 to 0.53, while strategic approach (0.87) and policy levers (0.80) continue to exceed implementation (0.78) and monitoring (0.65).
Four priority areas are set out: moving from foundations to widely adopted interoperable systems and broader data sharing; strengthening investment and skills to deliver impact; scaling trustworthy AI in government; and delivering joined-up, user-centred services. The report also cites 52% trust in government use of personal data for legitimate purposes, 63% of public institutions connected to national data interoperability systems, and 28% of countries assessing the impact of AI use.
🧩 What’s Covered
The extracted text covers the front matter, the Executive summary, Chapters 1 and 2 with their annexes, and Chapter 3 up to section 3.2.2.
- Front matter and Executive summary: citation, licence terms and ISBNs; a foreword stating that digital technologies and data are essential to public sector performance, resilience and trust; and the four priority areas for the next phase of digital government.
- Chapter 1, Digital governments at a turning point: the six dimensions of the Digital Government Policy Framework and the four transversal facets (strategic approach, policy levers, implementation, monitoring); 2025 DGI and OURdata results, including country scores and a 14% DGI increase since 2023; five barriers to operational delivery; and a box on agentic AI in government.
- Annexes 1.A and 1.B: country-level DGI composite and facet scores, OURdata pillar and sub-pillar scores, and the list of high-value datasets assessed, based primarily on the G8 Open Data Charter.
- Chapter 2, Strengthening digital public infrastructure and data governance: definitions of DPI components (digital identity, payments, core registries, data sharing, digital post, notifications, single gateways); digital identity governance, coverage and uptake; public-sector data strategies, data-management standards and ethical data principles; open data availability, accessibility and reuse; domestic and cross-border interoperability; and cloud and open-source software, with boxes on Estonia, Finland, Denmark, Italy, Japan, Czechia, the Netherlands and eIDAS 2.0.
- Chapter 3, Governing digital investment and capabilities to deliver at scale (partial): key messages on investment and capability, the OECD Digital Government Investments Framework with its three pillars, central oversight mandates, planning and funding tools, and the start of the discussion of flexibility and risk-proportionate review.
💡 Why it matters?
For people who govern, assess or audit public-sector digital and AI programmes, the report supplies comparative evidence on where implementation, not strategy, stalls. It names concrete governance mechanisms – staged funding tied to gateway reviews (Australia), lifecycle project management (Switzerland), central oversight mandates (New Zealand, Chile, Korea) – and links data quality, interoperability and monitoring to whether AI can be scaled beyond pilots. Figures such as 28% of countries assessing AI impact and 63% of institutions connected to interoperability systems give auditors and oversight bodies benchmarks to argue for monitoring and assurance, while the identity and open data findings frame adoption, trust and privacy as governance problems rather than technical ones.
❓ What’s Missing
The extraction is partial: it stops at section 3.2.2, so the risk-management, procurement, monitoring and evaluation, digital talent and build-versus-buy sections of Chapter 3, and all of Chapters 4 and 5 on AI in government and human-centred services, are known only from the table of contents and chapter key messages. The report is a cross-country survey whose evidence comes from 2025 OECD surveys covering 1 January 2023 to 31 December 2024, so findings are period-bound. Several headline figures are OECD averages rather than country results, and Germany and the United States are absent from the 2025 data.
👥 Best For
Compliance and assurance leads benchmarking public-sector digital and AI governance; public-sector strategy and digital transformation teams designing investment, data and identity governance; and policy analysts who need OECD comparative evidence on AI adoption, guardrails and monitoring in government.
📄 Source Details
Digital Government Outlook 2026: From Foundations to Transformational Impact, published by OECD Publishing, Paris, 2026, cited as OECD (2026), with ISBN 978-92-64-97814-0 (print), 978-92-64-88028-3 (PDF) and 978-92-64-44851-3 (HTML), under a CC BY 4.0 licence, https://doi.org/10.1787/0496b2bc-en. The Acknowledgements name Jamie Berryhill, Chloe Chadwick and colleagues as chapter drafters. The input was a partial text extraction of 80 of 184 pages, covering the front matter, Executive summary, Chapters 1 and 2, their annexes, and Chapter 3 to section 3.2.2.
