Published on the 07/04/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
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 Australia the continuing expansion of the Federal Government’s cloud services panel, along with an ever-growing range of locally hosted software-as-a-service options (including the recent release of Microsoft Office 365 in Australia) is encouraging government CIOs to begin their cloud adventures. At time of writing there are 84 vendors now accepted onto the Australian Government’s cloud computing panel.
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.
Transformed government is the intent of the Australia’s recently announced Digital Transformation Office set up by communications minister Malcolm Turnbull. The organisation is currently seeking a CEO.
The Office will sit outside of any government department as a form of digital sandbox where teams of developers, designers and researchers will be charged with creating new models for government service delivery, and also provide a focus point for new digital services for State and Territory Governments.
This model will however likely shrink the role of Federal Government CIOs who will become executors of the DTO’s ideas rather than innovators in their own right, with the DTO now charged with the role of coming up with new service models which are then implemented at a department level.
