The European organisations targeted in Net Impact: Public Sector are not the typical users of technology. In order to isolate technology-driven best practices, the study focused on public sector organisations that were most likely to be experiencing some sort of impact – positive or negative – from their technology investments.

Earlier Net Impact studies found that organisations using Internet business applications achieved single-digit productivity improvements, measured as a reduction in operating costs, over ones that did not adopt technologies. With this in mind, organisations that qualified for the study had to be a "Connected Organisation" defined as having one or more active enterprise business applications distributed throughout their network.

In all, over 1400 ICT and business decision-makers participated from the following eight countries: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the UK.