Cloud solutions, cyber security and analytics are the top technologies targeted for new and additional spending by public sector chief information officers (CIOs) in 2018.
This is according to market analyst firm Gartner, which points out that data centre infrastructure is the most commonly targeted for cost savings.
Gartner's 2018 CIO Agenda Survey gathered data from 3 160 CIO respondents in 98 countries and across major industries, including 461 government CIOs. Government respondents are segmented into national or federal; state or province (regional); local; and defence and intelligence, to identify trends specific to each tier.
According to the study, 16% of government CIOs said they plan to increase spending on business intelligence (BI) and analytics, while 6% are prioritising data management.
Digital transformation is the top-ranked business priority among government CIOs overall, followed by security and governance, the report says.
"Digital transformation revolves around data. To be successful, public sector CIOs need to focus on expanding their data and analytics capabilities and creating a data-centric culture, by increasing the availability of open data and APIs [application programming interfaces] for internal use and public consumption," says Rick Howard, research vice-president at Gartner.
"Building out data analytics infrastructure is fundamental to improving government programme outcomes and services to citizens."
The survey found that digital business/digital transformation is more important for government (first priority for 18% of respondents) than for all industries (17%), with the exception of defence and intelligence agencies (6%).
Private sector companies ranked it second, after growth/market share. The next three business priorities for government are security, safety and risk (13%); governance, compliance and regulations (12%); and technology initiatives/improvements (11%).
"Government CIOs have conflicting priorities - to bring transformative change to their organisations, while pursuing compliance-oriented priorities," notes Howard. "They will need to work constructively with other business leaders to agree how to balance risk and innovation to support digital transformation."
In response to the question: "Which technology investment is most crucial to achieving your organisation's mission?" cloud and BI/analytics were mentioned by 19% and 18% of government CIOs respectively, followed by infrastructure/data centre at 11%.
National and federal CIOs are the exception, placing customer relationship management as a distant third.
"Many government CIOs are rebalancing capital expenditure and operating expenditure spending patterns to reduce technical debt, while making the strategic shift to cloud," Howard notes. "They should consider cloud as the means to accelerate the digitalisation of their organisations and enable the business optimisation that results."
Gartner says consistent with ranking cloud, analytics and infrastructure/data centre as crucial to achieving the organisation's mission, government CIOs also anticipate increased spending in these areas.
While only 5% of government CIOs considered security and risk as crucial to achieving the organisation's mission, 17% expect to boost spending in cyber/information security. This indicates that security is not a competitive differentiator for government, but additional spending over historical levels in this area is warranted as a response to relentless attempts to exploit system vulnerabilities, the analyst firm explains.
"The lessons of reputational damage and individual harm that can result from a data breach or compromised security have not been lost on business leaders," Howard says. "Consequently, they're willing to allocate more resources and attention to lower risk exposure from cyber attacks."
Share