Assessing digital maturity of municipal management[К Оценке Цифровой Зрелости Управления Муниципалитетом]

The transition to the digital model of national economy as well as the need to ensure municipality competitiveness and to improve quality of life, requires the existing management models to be revised. The introduction of digital technologies and the transfer of interaction between groups of citizens into digital space, on various platforms, emphasizes the relevance of researching the issue of digital management maturity and, which is most important, methodological approaches to its assessment. The COVID-19 pandemic, 2022 sanctions agenda and the current federal documents on digital economy development, increase the significance of theoretical studies on the digital maturity issue. The methodological basis of the research: documents analysis, classification, comparative analysis. While working on the article, the authors studied current regulations and strategic documents aimed at digital transformation of the national economy, as well as the scientific works by researchers covering the economy digitalization in general and the digitalization of municipalities in particular. The authors revealed that the scientific literature, as well as strategic documents, do not feature approaches to assessing the digital maturity of municipal management, which prevents the digital potential capacity of the territory from being fully realized. Based on the research results, the authors supplemented the historical stages of scientific and technological progress development with the «Digital society» stage and provided its characteristics, proposed a methodological approach to identifying maturity levels of digital municipality management, taking into account digital space availability, digital competence of public and municipal employees, demand for digital public and municipal services and a number of others; problems and ways of further development are formulated. In particular, the authors propose to establish several levels of digital maturity, characterized by certain values ​​of indicators, due to which problem areas are identified and priority areas for improving the digital municipality management are formed to advance to the next digital maturity level. The single methodological tool contributes not only to assessing the current state of a particular municipality, but also to ranking certain municipalities in order to identify digital development priorities at the regional and / or national level.