Digital transformation tops agenda for govt CIOs

Digital transformation their top priority for a plurality of government CIOs in 2018, with cloud solutions, cybersecurity and analytics the top categories targeted for additional spending.

These are among the conclusions of a survey of CIOs in 98 countries conducted by Gartner.

When asked which technology investment is most crucial to achieving their organisation's missions, government CIOs named cloud services (19%), analytics (18%) and infrastructure or data centres (11%).

But while only 5% named security and risk as the most important category, 17% indicated that they plan to increase spending in this category the most in 2018, placing it behind only cloud services (19%). Other popular top priorities for government CIOs include analytics (16%), infrastructure and data centres (14%) and digital marketing (7%).

The survey also found that digital transformation is the first priority for 18% of government CIOs, followed by security, safety and risk (13%), compliance and regulations (12%) and technology improvements (11%).

"Government CIOs have conflicting priorities — to bring transformative change to their organisations, while pursuing compliance-oriented priorities. They will need to work constructively with other business leaders to agree how to balance risk and innovation to support digital transformation," Gartner Research VP Rick Howard said.

"Many government CIOs are rebalancing capital expenditure (capex) and operating expenditure (opex) spending patterns to reduce technical debt, while making the strategic shift to cloud. They should consider cloud as the means to accelerate the digitalisation of their organisations and enable the business optimisation that results."

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/kantver

Follow us and share on Twitter and Facebook