Exploring e-maturity in Italian local governments: empirical results from a three-step latent class analysis

This article undertakes a quantitative and holistic approach to frame a model of e-maturity in local governments, defined as the extent to which technologies permeate public service delivery. Moreover, the study adds evidence on the performance associated with different levels of e-maturity. In so doing, we collect survey data from 814 Italian local governments and integrate it with secondary sources. We propose a new angle for assessing e-maturity at the local government level, where the novel approach is the categorisation of public services on the basis of their final users. The application of a latent class analysis shows that the level of e-maturity is quite limited among Italian local governments and that most of them tend to prioritise government-to-business rather than government-to-citizen services in their digitisation process. A high level of e-maturity is associated with greater effectiveness rather than efficiency.