The International Data Corporation (IDC) lists a marked increase in the adoption of shared services at all levels of government among its top 10 predictions for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) public sectors.
The top 10 predictions were revealed during a Web conference, attended by more than 100 government organisations and vendors.
The conference highlighted key trends and developments that will impact the EMEA public sectors' business and technology investment decisions in 2012 and beyond.
Jan Duffy, research director of IDC Government Insights for the EMEA region, says the predictions were informed by the question of what makes government IT smart.
Green poster-child
The first prediction is that there will be a dramatic increase in government use of private cloud services in Western Europe.
Duffy says this year was particularly difficult for governments across the region. “Economic conditions, in some cases, were dire, and in many cases, governments are considering alternative models of service delivery as part of their ongoing plans to deal with longer term financial austerity, but the challenge is balancing service delivery with reduced expenditure.”
The perception of lower cost and increased flexibility will drive higher government interest in the use of open source software in 2012, says the IDC.
Its third prediction is that, as the belt-tightening continues within governments, there will be a marked increase in the adoption of shared services in many shapes and sizes at all levels of government, across all public sector organisations, departments and functions.
“Once the poster-child of green IT, virtualisation and consolidation are now considered key to optimised resource use and cost reduction, and we expect governments to accelerate the reduction in the number of servers and data centres,” says the corporation.
The next expectation is that interest in business process outsourcing will increase across governments in Europe, particularly if there are obvious cost savings involved.
growth
“Governments will continue to rewrite the procurement and commissioning rules, and ICT and related services will be subjected to changes, including innovative funding, multi-party joint ventures, pay-as-you-go, and cross-agency contracts,” adds the IDC.
Its seventh prediction is that, to minimise the risk of inappropriate public sector spending, there will be more contracts based on payment for priority-based, measurable outcomes.
The next forecast is that increased use of cloud computing will require more time to be spent on reviewing the terms and conditions of service level agreements to ensure needed services are properly covered.
“The volume of digital information will continue to grow, but in a world of changing technologies and increasing threat sophistication, government investment in organising, managing and securing this data will receive high priority and continue to increase.”
The corporation's final prediction is that governments will develop plans that allow for easy access and analysis of both data and content to better support the most appropriate distribution of social, healthcare and educational services and resources.
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