In the Public Interest: The Decoupling of Digital Transformation and Benefits Realization in the Public Sector

Abstract

The Swedish public sector invests substantial resources in digital transformation to meet external demands such as technological development, citizens’ expectations, and political pressure. Despite these efforts, research shows that digital transformation is often implemented as technical- and organizational change decoupled from benefits realization, resulting in unrealized public value. This thesis explores why such decoupling occurs and how digital transformation and benefits realization should instead be understood as coupled processes. The thesis combines research on digital transformation and benefits realization through the lens of institutional theory to explain why digital transformation ambitions are often decoupled from practice. The empirical foundation consists of four qualitative studies conducted in two Swedish regions, based on interviews, policy documents, digital initiative portfolios, and longitudinal observations. The study applies a qualitative, interpretive multi-case approach analyzing digital transformation practices and governance processes between 2019 and 2021. The research was conducted in close collaboration with practice, in line with the principles of engaged scholarship, and with a reflexive approach to the researcher’s dual role as both a researcher and practitioner. The four papers analyze digital transformation through different theoretical lenses: translation theory (Article 1), valuation studies (Article 2), temporality (Article 3), and ambidexterity and the resource-based view (Article 4). In the synthesizing analysis, a structural and institutionally grounded form of decoupling emerges that prevents the realization of expected benefits. Four recurrent types of decoupling are identified: between policy and practice, between values and evaluation, between different temporalities, and between means and ends. These institutional forms of decoupling explain how and why benefits realization is often reduced to symbolic activities and fails to deliver the intended benefits in practice. The theoretical contribution of the thesis is a processual understanding of how digital transformation and benefits realization are mutually dependent and coupled. By synthesizing the findings from the four studies, the conceptual model Digital Benefits Realization (DBR) is developed. The model demonstrates how these processes are held together over time through reflexive governance practices, expressed in two central forms of coupling: preempting and recoupling. Preempting refers to proactive governance and coordination practices that prevent decoupling between ambition and practice in the early stages, while recoupling refers to reconnecting practices that re-establish coupling between governance and practice once decoupling has occurred, when new decisions, conditions, or value conflicts reshape the direction of the digital transformation process. Furthermore, the thesis shows that digital transformation in the public sector is not a linear movement from policy to practice but a continuous and negotiated process among actors across multiple organizational levels. These negotiations concern the coordination of governance logics, values, and temporality, and the continuous recoupling of goals and means to enable the realization of public benefits. The thesis thus demonstrates a shift from viewing benefits realization as a post-implementation activity for measurement and reporting towards understanding digital transformation and benefits realization as coupled processes. In doing so, it contributes to a theoretical reframing of both digital transformation and benefits realization – not as separate, sequential processes, but as a dynamic and connected process of continuous coupling, decoupling, and recoupling. The DBR model thereby explains how value creation and legitimacy are sustained through reflexive governance, that is, through reflective dialogues, negotiation, temporal adjustments, and coordination and mutual translation between governance and practice. Practically, the thesis contributes to redefining how governance can be exercised in digital transformation. It shows that governance needs to be reflexive, coordinating, and translational, enacted through dialogue across organizational levels and actors to avoid various forms of decoupling and thereby enable the achievement of public value. The role of leadership thus shifts from controlling to enabling through joint translation of goals, creation of shared understanding, and establishment of arenas for continuous dialogue and coupling across organizational levels.