The balanced digitalization and digital security : Case of regional authorities

Abstract

The emerging digital infrastructure enables the public authorities to shape their processes and to create attractive digital services for the citizens and the business actors. The public processes, services and infrastructure, however, engage with global and local public and private digital infrastructure and service providers. The complex comprehensiveness of the digital infrastructure and the services challenges the public authorities and create new types of security risks. The achieving of the benefits of the digitalization of public processes and services without increasing security risks requires the adopting of novel approaches to digital security. The paper refers to a framework that aims to balance the digitalization and digital security of society. The approach follows the complex adaptive system and social system theories. The paper demonstrates the framework with widely known digital service indexes and digital security indexes. The paper applies the referred framework and the results of its demonstration in a case study about the governing of the digitalization resources and activities of the regional authorities. The case study was related to a major structural reform. The aim of the reform was to form and launch the operations of new counties. The means of the reform included the co-creation of new types of digital processes and services in collaboration and with the citizens and the business actors as well as with the central government. The empirical data of the case study included the ICT costs, digitalization efforts, shared ICT services and digital security situation of the regions. The central government analyzed the empirical data for the simulation of the financial negotiations between the central government and the regions. The results of the case study show that the framework supported the outlining of the contents of the empirical data so that both the digitalization and digital security aspects were concerned and visualized. The authorities will apply the results of the analysis for the governing of the regions.