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Govt organisations ‘struggling’ to scale digital projects

Despite increases in demand for digitalisation work and government IT services spending during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The majority of government organisations around the world are not adequately scaling digital transformation projects, providing partners with a chance to pick up the slack.

According to industry analyst firm Gartner, this is despite the increases in demand for digitalisation work and government IT services spending during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Citizens expect results, they are not interested in effort,” said Dean Lacheca, senior research director at Gartner.

“Digital government programs have accelerated during the pandemic and attracted more investment, yet many governments are still struggling to translate this into results at scale. Those that are yet to scale digital should build on the momentum unleashed by the disruption to progress their digital transformation.”

A survey of 166 government organisations around the world found 55 per cent were failing to scale effectively'; 45 per cent had a developing digital maturity, which Gartner defined as using some digital solutions for end-to-end processes.

Additionally, 8 per cent had an initial digital maturity and 2 per cent were at the exploring stage, the latter of which having little to no progress beyond digital experimentation.

Credit: Gartner

“However, the data highlights the yet-to-be-realised opportunities for government organisations, as more than half of all respondents have not scaled the benefits of digital solutions across their organisations,” Lacheca said.

Indeed, this provides partners with leverage to enter discussions with these government organisations and assist with digital transformation projects.

The same can be said particularly for the bottom 10 per cent at the initial and exploring stages, as Lacheca claimed the issues with these organisations around digital projects are typically cultural, with digital leadership needing to be expanded past IT teams in order to embrace the solutions.

This then leaves room for partners to provide plans around, and cultivate, that digital leadership.

Meanwhile, the remaining 45 per cent — covering the maturity levels of defining, managed and optimising — as having an “extensive use of digital”.

“These digitally advanced government organisations are realising more of the benefits, such as higher efficiency, cost reductions, greater workforce productivity, compliance and transparency,” said Lacheca. “Even more important are outcomes associated with public purpose or mission, such as citizen experience and community safety.”

The organisations with the top optimising level of digital maturity — 5 per cent of surveyed respondents — should not be neglected, however, as this group is still exploring new digital projects to scale within their organisations.