Conceptualising Distributed Digital Leadership in the Public Sector

Digital leadership is essential for digital transformation and digital government success. Digital leadership is, however, not a single job role or a one-person responsibility. In practice, digital leadership responsibilities are distributed amongst different roles within the organisation and between agencies when it comes to scarce or technically specific roles. To maximise strategic alignment and enable change at scale and at pace, we suggest it is paramount to understand ‘who’ participates in, and ‘how’ digital leadership is distributed within an organisation and how the concept of Distributed Digital Leadership can be applied across government agencies to achieve All of Government goals. To examine these considerations, we conducted a Qualitative Document Analysis of the Job Descriptions of senior digital leaders in the New Zealand public service and identified cross-agency examples where distributed digital leadership is intentionally and strategically aligned with digital strategy (e.g. New Zealand’s strategy for the digital public service). We concluded that the digital leader role is distributed to a certain extent both within agencies and between agencies, especially in public sector organisations where a ‘joined-up’, ‘citizen-centric’ approach to digital government is encouraged. Finally, using an illustrative example, we provide a conceptual framework which provides further guidance for distributed digital leadership practice in the public sector.