Digital Government Authority announces rise in digital experience maturity index to 87.06 per cent in 2026

What happened

Saudi Arabia's Digital Government Authority (DGA) has announced that its digital experience maturity index rose to 87.06 per cent, according to reporting picked up by Gulf Daily News. The index is one of the metrics the DGA uses to track how government digital services perform for the people who actually use them.

The announcement was framed as evidence of continued progress in the country's digital government programme, though the underlying reporting does not detail the specific services, channels or user segments measured, nor the prior-year baseline against which the rise is calculated.

Why it matters

A national digital experience maturity index is, in effect, a public scorecard for service design at scale. When a government authority puts a single percentage figure on how well its digital services meet user expectations, it signals that experience quality is being treated as a measurable, accountable outcome rather than a soft aspiration — a principle private-sector CX and behavioural-economics practitioners have long argued for but rarely see adopted so explicitly by public institutions.

For service designers and CX leaders across the GCC, this kind of index matters less for the specific number and more for what it implies about measurement infrastructure: consistent, longitudinal tracking of digital maturity creates the conditions for benchmarking, prioritisation and course-correction. It also sets a reference point that private operators in adjacent sectors — banking, telecoms, retail — may find themselves implicitly compared against as citizen expectations of "good digital experience" are shaped by their interactions with government platforms.

By the numbers

• 87.06 per cent — the reported digital experience maturity index score announced by the Digital Government Authority.

The Renascence take

Headline indices like this one are useful signals, but they are easy to over-read. A single aggregate score tells us direction, not diagnosis — and diagnosis is where service design actually earns its keep.

What most coverage of indices like this misses is that a rising maturity score is a lagging indicator, not a strategy. The real question for any organisation — public or private — chasing a similar metric is whether the score is built from genuine behavioural signals (task completion, effort, drop-off, sentiment at the moment of use) or from self-reported service inventories that look good on paper but say little about lived friction. A customer-obsessed operator watching this announcement shouldn't ask "how do we hit a similar number", but "what specific frictions moved the needle, and are we measuring the same things in our own digital journeys before we publish a score we can't defend."