CIOs to focus technology investments on data analytics and cybersecurity in 2019

Muscat: Data analytics and cybersecurity pushed cloud out of the top spot for increased technology investment by government CIOs in 2019, according to a survey from Gartner. This increased focus on data reflects CIOs’ acknowledgment that artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics will be the top “game-changing” technologies for government in 2019.
Gartner’s 2019 chief information officer (CIO) Agenda Survey gathered data from 3,102 CIO respondents in 89 countries and across major industries, including 528 government CIOs. Government respondents are segmented into national or federal; state or province (regional); local; and defense and intelligence, to identify trends specific to each tier.
“Taking advantage of data is at the heart of digital government — it’s the central asset to all that government oversees and provides,” said Rick Howard , VP analyst at Gartner. “The ability to leverage that data strategically in real time will significantly improve government’s ability to seamlessly deliver services, despite increased strain on finite resources.”
Digital maturity advancing
When it comes to strategic business priorities, the survey found that 18 per cent of CIOs across all levels of government have prioritized digital initiatives again this year as key to achieving mission outcomes, compared with 23 per cent from all other industries. The next three business priorities for government are industry-specific goals (13 per cent), operational excellence (13 per cent) and cost optimisation/reduction (8 per cent).
The survey data indicates that governments are making deliberate progress toward designing and delivering digital services, achieving comparable maturity to other industries overall. When asked what stage their digital initiative was at, 29 per cent of government respondents say their organisations are scaling and refining their digital initiatives — the tipping point at which a digital initiative is considered mature. This is up from 15 per cent in the 2018 survey. However, government is still lagging other industries (33 per cent overall) in scaling and refining digital initiatives. The gap is particularly marked in defence and intelligence, where just nine percent of respondents have scaled digital initiatives.
“To meet increased demand and evolving expectations of citizens for effective and efficient services, government must continue to enhance its digital maturity,” Howard said. “Government CIOs clearly recognise the potential of digital government and have started developing new digital services, but now need to take digital beyond a vision to execution through digital leadership.”
Despite the focus on digital, only 17 per cent of government CIOs plan to increase their investment in digital business initiatives, compared with 34 per cent of CIOs in other industries. While government CIOs demonstrate clear vision in the potential for digital government and its emerging technologies, 45 per cent report they lack the IT and business resources required to execute.
AI has taken the lead as the top game-changing technology for government CIOs for 2019. AI (27 per cent) is followed by data analytics (22 per cent) and cloud technologies (19 per cent). Cloud dropped from first across all levels of government last year, to third overall in this year’s survey.