Government CIOs Spend 21 Percent of Their IT Budget on Digital Initiatives, Gartner Survey Finds

According to a global survey of CIOs by Gartner, Inc., top-performing organizations in the private and public sectors, on average, spend a greater proportion of their IT budgets on digital initiatives (33 percent) than government organizations (21 percent).

Looking forward to 2018, top-performing organizations anticipate spending 43 percent of their IT budgets on digitalization, compared with 28 percent for government CIOs.

Gartner’s 2017 CIO Agenda survey includes the views of 2,598 CIOs from 93 countries, representing $9.4 trillion in revenue or public sector budgets and $292 billion in IT spending, including 377 government CIOs in 38 countries. Government respondents are segmented into national or federal, state or province (regional) and local jurisdictions, to identify trends specific to each tier. For the purposes of the survey, respondents were also categorized as top, typical and trailing performers in digitalization.

Rick Howard, research vice president at Gartner, said that 2016 proved to be a watershed year in which frustration with the status quo of government was widely expressed by citizens at the voting booth and in the streets, accompanied by low levels of confidence and trust about the performance of public institutions.

“This has to be addressed head on,” said Howard. “Government CIOs in 2017 have an urgent obligation to look beyond their own organizations and benchmark themselves against top-performing peers within the public sector and from other service industries. They must commit to pursuing actions that result in immediate and measurable improvements that citizens recognize and appreciate.”

In an interview with SCMR, Howard said one of the challenges most government CIOs face is the age of their legacy business applications.

“Gartner's survey data indicates that – depending on tier of government – 51% to 60% of government core business applications were implemented between 1990 and 2009,” he said. “Top performing organizations in the private sector report 42% of their core business applications date from the same time period.”

Howard added that this “aging portfolio” of government systems and applications make them increasingly expensive to modernize. Furthermore, they present a growing risk from a security standpoint and are a barrier to digital innovation.

But the current Administration may be ready to recognize this, said:

“If recent reports in the media are accurate, then it appears the Trump Administration is committed to addressing the cybersecurity vulnerabilities of federal systems. This could serve as a catalyst to modernize or replace legacy systems at a faster pace than in the past.”

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