Government CIOs say they lack data analytics, data science and security skills in their workforce

ie: all the skills required for digital transformation and keeping hackers out

Government CIOs believe that the biggest barrier they must overcome to achieve their objectives is a lack of skills or resources - and data analytics and security are areas which they believe their workforce is lacking the most.

That's according to analyst organisation Gartner's 2017 CIO Agenda survey, which included interviews with 377 government CIOs in 38 countries - and 2,598 CIOs from 93 countries in total.

A quarter of government CIOs (26 per cent) said skills were their biggest barrier to overcome, followed by funding or budgets (19 per cent) and culture or structure of the organisation (12 per cent).

The domain of data analytics which includes data science and business intelligence is the area which the biggest proportion (30 per cent) of CIOs feel they need to bridge the skills gap the most, followed by security and risk (23 per cent).

Budget and investment

Government CIOs anticipate a 1.4 per cent average increase in their IT budgets compared with an average 2.2 per cent increase across all industries. Perhaps surprisingly, local government CIOs fare better - averaging 3.5 per cent growth.

The analyst company found that top-performing organisations in the public and private sectors (according to its own categorisation) spent a greater proportion of their IT budgets on digital initiatives (33 per cent) compared to government organisations (21 per cent).

When Gartner asked respondents to identify technologies with the most potential to change their organisations over the next five years, advanced analytics came out on top across all levels of government (79 per cent). More than half of government CIOs (57 per cent) said that digital security remained a critical investment - particularly in defence and intelligence (74 per cent).

The Internet of Things (IoT) was of particular interest to local government CIOs, 67 per cent of whom said it would drive transformative change. Local government CIOs also saw more potential in autonomous vehicles (nine per cent) and smart robots (six per cent) than the rest of government and ‘top performer' organisations. All levels of government saw less opportunity in machine learning or Blockchain than ‘top performers' did, Gartner said.

Meanwhile, 58 per cent of government CIOs said that they participated in digital ecosystems, compared with 49 per cent across all industries. Gartner said that the concept of a digital ecosystem was not new to government CIOs and they participate in these ecosystems at rates higher than other industries as a matter of necessity and without planned design.

"The digital ecosystem becomes the means by which government can truly become more effective and efficient in the delivery of public services," said Rick Howard, research vice president at Gartner.

Howard suggested that this year, government CIOs had an urgent obligation to look beyond their own organisations 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 recognise and appreciate," he said.