Compare methods

	New Public Management Assessment	Digital Government Assessment
Field	Public Administration	Public Administration
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1991	2020
Originator	Christopher Hood	OECD digital-government programme
Type	Analytical assessment framework	Composite benchmarking index
Seminal source	Hood, C. (1991). A Public Management for All Seasons? Public Administration, 69(1), 3–19.	OECD. Digital Government Index (DGI) and Digital Government Policy Framework. OECD, Paris.
Aliases	NPM Assessment, Managerialism Assessment, Public Management Reform Analysis, Hood NPM Doctrine Analysis	Digital Government Index Method, Digital Maturity Assessment, GovTech Assessment, Digital Public Service Benchmarking
Related	4	4
Summary	New Public Management (NPM) assessment evaluates how far a public organisation or system has adopted the cluster of managerial reform doctrines that swept the public sector from the 1980s — and with what effects. Christopher Hood's 1991 article A Public Management for All Seasons? gave NPM its name and identified its core doctrines: hands-on professional management, explicit performance standards, output controls, disaggregation into units, competition, private-sector management styles, and discipline in resource use. The assessment scores adoption of these doctrines, evaluates their effects, and appraises the trade-offs against enduring public-service values such as equity and accountability.	Digital government assessment measures how far a public administration has moved beyond merely digitising existing processes toward becoming digital by design — using data, platforms and user-centred service design as core operating principles. The OECD Digital Government Index, built on its six-dimension Digital Government Policy Framework, is the leading instrument, scoring countries on dimensions such as being digital by design, data-driven, government as a platform, open by default, user-driven and proactive. Evidence is collected through a structured survey, verified, scored and aggregated into a weighted composite. It complements the supply-focused UN E-Government Development Index.