Digital maturity: Testing an existing framework through scale development

Digital maturity frameworks have become central instruments of digital government practice, used by public sector organizations, national agencies, and international bodies to assess and steer digital transformation. Despite their widespread use, few frameworks have been subjected to rigorous psychometric testing. The scores they produce therefore rest on unverified assumptions about dimensionality, reliability, and validity. We address this gap by applying scale development methodology to a digital maturity framework deployed across more than 160 Swedish public sector organizations since 2018. Through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis on a cleaned and multiply imputed sample from 118 organizations, we evaluate the framework's latent factor structure. The analysis yields a four-factor model that is empirically supported within the studied sample, comprising Digital Operations, Digital Legacy, Benefit Management, and Digital Development, subsumed under a second-order factor of Evaluated Digital Maturity. The results also reveal specific weaknesses that are predictable consequences of deploying an instrument developed without scale development methodology. We make two contributions. First, we provide a large-scale empirical test of a widely used digital maturity framework in the public sector, identifying its strengths and the implications of developing an instrument without psychometric grounding. Second, we adapt scale development methodology from prospective scale construction to retrospective framework evaluation, strengthening measurement in digital government research.