CIOs of top-performing organisations in the private and public sectors globally are spending 33 percent of their IT budget on digital initiatives.
Government CIOs are only spending 21 percent of their IT budget on digital programs, market research firm Gartner said on Wednesday.
Top organisations anticipate spending 43 percent of their IT budgets on digital business, compared with 28 percent for government CIOs in 2018.
Government CIOs in 2017 have an obligation to look beyond their own organisations and benchmark themselves against top-performing peers within the public sector and from other service industries.
The survey included 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 CIOs anticipate 1.4 percent average increase in their IT budgets, compared with an average 2.2 percent increase across all industries.
Local government CIOs fare better, averaging 3.5 percent growth, which is more than one percent less on average than IT budget growth among top-performing organisations overall (4.6 percent).
The top three barriers that government CIOs report they must overcome to achieve their objectives are skills or resources (26 percent), funding or budgets (19 percent), and culture or structure of the organisation (12 percent).
“Compared with CIOs in other industries, government CIOs tend not to partner with startups and midsize companies, missing out on new ideas, skills and technologies,” said Rick Howard, research vice president at Gartner.
The government sector is vulnerable in the domain of data analytics (30 percent), which includes information, analytics, data science and business intelligence. Security and risk is ranked second for government overall (23 percent).
58 percent of government CIOs report they participate in digital ecosystems, compared with 49 percent across all industries.
Gartner said advanced analytics takes the top spot across all levels of government (79 percent). Digital security remains a critical investment for all levels of government (57 percent), particularly in defense and intelligence (74 percent).
