Frequent organisational changes, funds shortage hamper govt CIOs: Gartner

A report by global research and advisory company Gartner showed that 58% of government chief information officers (CIOs) faced organisational disruption, while 52% faced shortage of funds and these factors disrupted their ability to carry out their jobs well.

The study, titled 2020 CIO Agenda: A Government Perspective, was conducted from June to August 2019 and took inputs from 130 government CIOs globally.    

“Disruption will affect their (government CIOs) IT budget growth, and the funding and launch of new business initiatives will suffer,” Alia Mendonsa, senior research director at Gartner, said.

Mendonsa said that inflexible funding models exacerbated the issue, owing to budgetary processes and cycles within the government. She said that the government sector lagged behind all other industries in terms of digital leadership skills and strategy, “particularly in its ability to communicate a clear and consistent business strategy that articulates how the organisation will achieve its vision”. 

The report also stated that only 48% of government CIOs said their organisations had a clear cut and consistent business strategy.  

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However, on the flip side, these government CIOs are ahead of other industries in terms of enhancing citizen-centric deployments.

“Government CIOs should assess the maturity of their IT processes to identify areas of strength and weakness, and then prioritise implementation of improved processes and workflows according to the results,” Mendonsa said.

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The survey said data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud technologies would remain game changers for government CIOs in 2020. As much as 84% of respondents said they had already deployed or were focused on deploying cybersecurity in the next 12 months, while 37% and 33% said they planned to deploy AI and robotic process automation (RPA) respectively.

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Emphasising on the need to adopt new technologies, Mendonsa said cloud and data analytics offered immediate benefits if deployed and should be prioritised. 

“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,” she said.