Development of an Intelligent Information Index Model for Local Government in South Korea

The purpose of this study is to develop a model to measure the level of informatization of local governments in South Korea. As digital technology advances, the policy environment is changing. However, advances in digital technology do not have the same effect on all local governments. Instead, the possibility of new gaps in different regions has raised a new problem depending on the level of digital technology acceptance and capabilities. However, objective methods of measuring local informatization levels are still insufficient. The purpose of this study is to fill these gaps and develop a diagnostic model that can identify different levels of local informatization. This study aims to evaluate the performance of informatization from a holistic perspective that encompasses providers, users, and services. First, the provider sector includes Information and Communications Technology (ICT)-related organizations, people, budgets, local informatization networks, and institutions from the perspective of informatization input or infrastructure. Second, the service sector consists of essential services and provisions provided by local governments for citizens and internal users, and the efforts to utilize and apply new technologies related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution from the perspective of informatization projects. Third, the user sector considers not only functional performance, such as the utilization rate related to local informatization, but also reaction, satisfaction, performance, and participation of citizens and civil servants as users. The index developed in this study has the following two purposes. First, it was applied to the evaluation of 245 local governments—17 regional and 228 basic local governments—in South Korea to determine the level of informatization of each local government. Second, the analysis of each sub-indicator can then be used to diagnose the problems of each local government's informatization policy and develop improvement measures. The development of the indicators in this study is as follows. First, the Delphi method was conducted with 18 participants, including experts, to ensure the validity of the indicators. Through this, the sub-indicators and indicator setting of four areas, including the supplier and infrastructure sectors, service and delivery system sectors, performance, and consumer sectors, and the overall indicators were verified. Second, the Analytic Hierarchy Process was conducted to verify the validity of the developed index model and synthesize individual indicators. This determined the importance of the substantial categories and sub-indicators of each significant category that were identified. The model was divided into three major categories and 11 middle categories, and the weights of the indicators were separately organized by regional and basic local governments.