Mohamed Taib, Nadia Monira; (2025) Tactical Capacity for Bureaucracy: Advancing Digital Transformation in the Malaysian Public Sector. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Governments worldwide have pursued digital transformation to enhance public sector effectiveness and efficiency for decades. Broadly, digital transformation in the public sector focuses on comprehensive initiatives to refine core government procedures and service delivery mechanisms by iterating policies and processes according to user needs. In practice, governments must build new public sector capacities to deliver on the promise of digital transformation. However, not all governments succeed in delivering strong outcomes, and the academic literature has yet to fully identify the principles and work processes that are needed to do so. This thesis confronts this dilemma by exploring which underlying and new capacities are critical to advancing digital transformation. It introduces tactical capacity for bureaucracy in the digital era as an ‘integrative skill set’ to realign uneven capacities and reshape digital outcomes through agile practices, bureaucracy hacking, collaborative approaches and dynamic capabilities. Using data from 89 semi-structured elite interviews and documentary analysis, the study adopts a qualitative single-case study and historical analysis between 1996 and 2020, with embedded cross-case analysis on Malaysia, a non-Western country with strong top-down public sector dynamics. The study finds support and an empirical pattern for the novel capacity in the case of four organisations and projects. Through adapting the public sector capacity framework, the findings suggest a marked gap between high analytical capacity and low operational capacity in the Malaysian public sector, particularly during certain periods. The findings also show that uneven capacity distribution across public sector organisations contributes to varied outcomes and that a cross-cutting capacity might be necessary to minimise the identified variations. The findings further point to the significance of tactical capacity as an ‘integrative skill set’ to improve the bureaucracy and deliver better digital outcomes, as well as its value as an added capacity dimension to enhance the analytical-empirical framework for theory and practice.

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