Published on the 07/04/2015 | Written by Beverley Head, Clare Coulson
Asia Pacific government CIOs are facing more budgetary pressure than their international or private sector peers…
Research organisation Gartner has performed a new cut of the data in its 2015 CIO survey to examine the landscape facing public sector CIOs. Of the 2800 CIOs surveyed globally, 343 identified as Government CIOs. An Australia/New Zealand data cut is not available, but Gartner said that Asia Pacific CIOs were feeling the pinch more than others in terms of budget cuts.
Legacy modernisation remains a priority for many government CIOs with many still slow to embrace cloud despite cloud-first policies being rolled out in Australia, the US and UK.
The top five priorities for government CIOs are infrastructure and data centre, business intelligence and analytics, cloud, mobile and legacy modernisation.
Despite the slow progress with cloud, Gartner predicts that the increasing range of services being developed for the public sector will inevitably shift the focus off legacy and onto cloud services orchestration.
In New Zealand cloud computing has been identified as a key enabler of the Government ICT Strategy and Action Plan, which seeks to improve service delivery and deliver substantial savings across government. As such in 2012 the Government established a cloud-first policy and an all-of-government (AoG) direction for the use, development and deployment of cloud services. At the time of writing nine vendors had been approved to offer cloud solutions to the Government under the Government ICT Common Capability programme.
According to Gartner research director Rick Howard: “With cost, value and security as top considerations, Government CIOs should begin with the assumption that public cloud is the preferred deployment option and then if necessary work back from public cloud to the cloud, co-location or on premises option,” which he saw as a necessary precursor to the public sector being able to offer transformed government performance and social outcomes.
Gartner’s research also showed that the opportunities to enhance government services will increasingly involve unstructured, harder-to-process information, such as multimedia and social information.
It said the rate of change meant backward-looking reporting is becoming less and less valuable and suggested that government CIOs need to “develop the capabilities to generate forward-looking predictive analytics and combine this information with data-led experimentation to create the future”.
