Skip to main content

Government Leaders Fail to Fund New IT Infrastructure

Given the typical complexity of planning and achieving a digital transformation, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) within federal, state or local governments have many challenges. As an example, they must rely upon the financial approval of elected or appointed leaders that are incapable of understanding the current business technology landscape.

Government CIOs struggle to obtain funding for qualified independent consultants that can help them to validate their requirements for modern IT infrastructure. Some IT vendors provide professional services that offer transformation guidance, but it's often inconclusive. A survey has uncovered the key issues.

Government IT Market Development

Fifty-eight percent of government CIOs faced organizational disruption during the past four years, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner. Fifty-two percent of respondents said they had also faced a funding shortfall in that same timeframe.

Note, these figures are higher than those for all other industries.

"Governments are struggling in many areas, following disruptions including changes in leadership, reorganizations and funding shortfalls. For many government CIOs, disruption will affect their IT budget growth, and the funding and launch of new business initiatives will suffer," said Alia Mendonsa, senior research director at Gartner. "Inflexible funding models exacerbate this issue, due to budgetary processes and cycles within government."

Many CIOs of government organizations are still developing their digital transformation leadership skills. Moreover, the government sector is often deficient in all aspects of strategy -- particularly in its ability to communicate a clear agenda that articulates how the organization will achieve its vision.

The Gartner survey found that only 48 percent of government CIOs said their organization had a clear and consistent overall business strategy.

"In the absence of a formal business strategy, government CIOs need to incorporate strategic business outcomes into their digital government strategy. Business outcomes will be validated by the business as part of the strategy approval process," said Ms. Mendonsa.

However, on a more positive note, the survey results showed that government CIOs are ahead of other industries in enhancing citizen-centricity by developing and delivering digital services, however they remain slightly behind other industries in most IT process domains.

According to the Gartner assessment, in order to resolve this deficiency, government CIOs should assess the maturity of their IT processes to identify areas of strength and weakness, then prioritize implementation of improved processes and workflows according to the results.

The survey found that data and analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud technologies remain game-changers for government CIOs in 2020. Survey results showed that within the next 12 months the majority of the respondents had already deployed or are focused on deploying cybersecurity (84 percent), AI (37 percent) and robotic process automation (33 percent).

Outlook for Government IT Digital Transformation

"Government CIOs need to prioritize investment in emerging technologies according to potential value for their institution," said Ms. Mendonsa. "More mature technologies such as cloud and data and analytics offer immediate benefits in terms of capability and scalability for delivering digital government services, and therefore may be prioritized."

Furthermore, experiments with AI and robotic process automation may start small initially, and once their value can be demonstrated, initiatives involving these emerging technologies may be scaled up over time.

Popular posts from this blog

AI Semiconductor Revenue will Reach $119.4B

The Chief Information Officer (CIO) and/or the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) will guide Generative AI initiatives within the large enterprise C-Suite. They may already have the technical expertise and experience to understand the capabilities and limitations of Gen AI. They also have the authority and budget to make the necessary investments in infrastructure and talent to support Gen AI initiatives. Enterprise AI infrastructure is proven to be expensive to build, operate and maintain. That's why public cloud service provider solutions are often used for new AI use cases. AI Semiconductor Market Development Semiconductors designed to execute Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads will represent a $53.4 billion revenue opportunity for the global semiconductor industry in 2023, an increase of 20.9 percent from 2022, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner. "The developments in generative AI and the increasing use of a wide range AI-based applications in data c

Demand for Quantum Computing as a Service

The enterprise demand for quantum computing is still in its early stages, growing slowly. As the technology becomes more usable, we may see demand evolve beyond scientific applications. The global quantum computing market is forecast to grow from $1.1 billion in 2022 to $7.6 billion in 2027, according to the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). That's a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 48.1 percent. The forecast includes base Quantum Computing as a Service, as well as enabling and adjacent Quantum Computing as a Service. However, this updated forecast is considerably lower than IDC's previous quantum computing forecast, which was published in 2021, due to lower demand globally. Quantum Computing Market Development In the interim, customer spend for quantum computing has been negatively impacted by several factors, including: slower than expected advances in quantum hardware development, which have delayed potential return on inve

Industrial Cloud Computing Apps Gain Momentum

In the manufacturing industry, cloud computing can help leaders improve their production efficiency by providing them with real-time data about their operations. This has gained the attention of the C-suite. Total forecast Industrial Cloud platform revenue in manufacturing will surpass $300 billion by 2033 with a CAGR of 22.57 percent, driven by solution providers enhancing platform interoperability while expanding partner ecosystems for application development. ABI Research found the cloud computing manufacturing market will grow over the next decade due to the adoption of new architectural frameworks that enhance data extraction and interoperability for manufacturers looking to maximize utility from their data. Industrial Cloud Computing Market Development "Historically, manufacturers have built out their infrastructure to include expensive data housing in the form of on-premises servers. The large initial upfront cost of purchasing, setting up, and maintaining these servers is