Making the elephant dance: five dimensions for government digital transformation

Digital transformation has emerged as a major force in reshaping bureaucratic governance, yet whether it can render entrenched administrative systems more agile remains contested. This study develops a five-dimensional analytical framework, covering public service delivery, organizational structure, operating logic and processes, departmental responsibilities and administrative authority, and leadership, by drawing on the literature on bureaucracy and organizational change and a thematic synthesis of digital government transformation. The framework is applied to an in-depth qualitative case study of the One-Second Approval reform in Shenzhen City, China’s pioneering Special Economic Zone. The findings show that digital transformation reduces information silos, enables parallel processing, standardizes approval rules, and embeds them in unified platforms. Rather than dismantling bureaucracy, it produces a neo-bureaucratic form in which frontline discretion is compressed, authority shifts toward data governance, rule-setting, and platform operation, and hierarchical arrangements persist in hybrid forms. These effects emerge through the interaction of data integration, process redesign, and power reallocation, with sustained leadership serving as a key enabling condition. By showing that digital transformation can enhance agility through bureaucratic recomposition rather than de-bureaucratization, this study refines technology enactment theory and offers a transferable framework for future administrative reform.