According to a survey from Gartner, 55% of digital government programs are failing to scale despite increased focus and investment.
“Digital government programs have accelerated during the pandemic and attracted more investment, yet many governments are still struggling to translate this into results at scale. Those that are yet to scale digital should build on the momentum unleashed by the disruption to progress their digital transformation.”
Dean Lacheca, senior research director at Gartner, had said on October 26, 2021, while speaking at the virtual Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2021 for the APAC region.
Gartner’s Digital Transformation Divergence Across Government Sectors research was conducted in April-May 2021 with 166 respondents from government organisations in North America, EMEA and Asia Pacific, to understand differences in objectives, practices, the makeup of programs and success in scaling digital across government.
In the survey, 10% of respondents said they are at the early stages, experimenting, exploring, or deploying some citizen-facing digital services. Only 5% of respondents reported that they were at the top of the maturity scale, optimising the use of digital solutions that underpin all aspects of their organisation, and they are looking for new opportunities.
24% of government organisations were digitally advanced, delivering against transformation-focused digital initiatives and initiatives that optimised existing practices.
“These digitally advanced government organisations are realising more of the benefits, such as higher efficiency, cost reductions, greater workforce productivity, compliance and transparency. Even more important are outcomes associated with public purpose or mission, such as citizen experience and community safety,” said Lachea.
85% of digitally advanced respondents have successfully scaled digital and use it extensively across their organisations.
According to Gartner, some more digitally advanced governments have benefited from sustained, long-running digital government commitments. Others have made faster progress by establishing a balanced digital government agenda that includes transformational and optimisation initiatives.
Gartner recommends that government CIOs assess their organisation’s digital maturity and use the output to provide insight into areas of potential focus, communicate the real benefits to policymakers and stakeholders, and justify budget and prioritise IT investments.
The survey among public sector professionals across North America, EMEA and APAC, and explicitly focused on artificial intelligence, found employees’ high degree of scepticism, a cultural roadblock that has scuppered many an attempt to scale IT beyond proof of concept or department level projects.
In the study, Gartner says AI technologies were viewed with a level of uncertainty, especially among the government employees who have not worked with any AI-backed solutions.
“More than half (53%) of government employees who have worked with AI technologies believe they provide insights to do their job better, compared to 34% of employees who have not used AI.”
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