Less than five per cent of senior public-sector staff view their CIO or CTO as a 'driver of change'

CEOs are the main driver of transformation of frontline services according to majority of public-sector staff

Less than five per cent (4.2 per cent) of senior public-sector staff view their CIO and CTO as the drivers of change, a report from cloud solutions provider Ancoris reveals.

This chimes with comments from Jonathan Mitchell, non-executive chairman of the CIO practice at Harvey Nash, who said that CIOs were the ones to drive wholesale transformation in the public sector, but that only 10 per cent of serving CIOs are categorised as "agents of change", that is a CIO who is "bold in expressing their vision for change, with a clear ‘migration plan' for investment in digital technology" and "active in using technology to future-proof the entire organisation and ensure outcomes based intervention becomes a reality".

The vast majority of participants (59 per cent) in the Ancoris survey believed the main driver of transformation of frontline services was the CEO, while 36 per cent believed it was another role entirely.

"The low number of people recognising the role of the CIO and CTO in fostering change is worrying though. Organisations need to enable their IT teams to focus more on the people and process aspect of change in order to fully benefit from technology," said Duncan Farley, head of business transformation at Ancoris.

Over half of all Ancoris survey participants (57 per cent) said they believed people were the biggest barriers to delivering transformation programmes - only 12 per cent reported the biggest barrier as technology.

Perhaps this is why there is a divide in respondents' opinions on whether transformation programmes for frontline services can only be delivered through the use of digital technology - 45 per cent either agreed or strongly agreed with that statement, while 55 per cent either disagreed or strongly disagreed.

Despite much being said by government about being "digital by default" to improve the way services are delivered for the customer, the most commonly reported reason for change was "delivering more for less" (83 per cent). This was followed by "upgrading the customer experience" (70 per cent), and improving staff and partner collaboration (45 per cent).

When it came to technology strategies being adopted by the public sector, the vast majority of participants said that mobile, cloud and collaboration technologies were part of their organisation's IT strategy.

Surprisingly, only 36 per cent included big data in their strategy - although a Civica report found that public-sector organisations had made poor progress in data analytics in the past 10 years.

Almost two-thirds of organisations planned to introduce cloud technologies as part of their IT strategy, but 28 per cent of all respondents did not believe that cloud technology could benefit their organisation.