Lack of digital skills biggest hurdle for governments, according to Gartner survey

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A quarter of government chief information officers (CIOs) think a lack of digital skills are a barrier to achieving their goals, an international survey from tech industry analysts Gartner has found.

The research surveyed 377 government CIOs from 38 countries, asking them how much of their budget is dedicated to IT, where they see the biggest potential for technology use in government, and what barriers stand in their way.

When asked about the top three barriers that needed to be overcome, 26 per cent of respondents said skills, while 19 per cent said funding or budgets and 12 per cent said the culture or structure of the organisation.

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Respondents felt that data analytics and data science skills were the most lacking within their organisation, with 30 per cent saying they were vulnerable in that domain; security and risk were ranked second for government, with 23 per cent of respondents indicating this was a concern.

Rick Howard, research vice president at Gartner, said that if governments want to boost the digital skills of their staff, they need to take a more strategic approach to workforce development.

“One of those areas is looking to optimise and automate many of the public services that are being done inefficiently and by more manual means, and repositioning that part of the workforce to higher-value roles.”

“By re-training parts of the workforce that are often occupied with low-value activities, you can move them into areas of analytics, data modelling and data management; to those value-added activities.”

In addition, Howard said, governments can be “reluctant to embrace” start-ups and smaller businesses to bridge the skills gap.

“Some of the skills [governments need] are really coming forward in those newer companies,” he said, adding that this approach is commonplace in other industries.

Meanwhile, the Gartner survey also found that some of the most hyped technologies were yet to make an impact on the public sector, with all levels of government seeing less opportunity in machine learning or blockchain than the top performing organisations across all sectors.

Advanced analytics topped governments’ to-do lists, with 79 per cent saying that it was a priority area of work; while 68 per cent listed internet of things as high up on their agenda, and 57 per cent picked out digital security.

The survey also found that, overall, global government CIOs are anticipating a 1.4 per cent increase in their IT budgets in the next year - compared with a 2.2 per cent average across all industries.

This ties in with Gartner’s benchmark analysis, which found that average IT spending for state and local governments in 2016 represented four per cent of the organisation’s operating budget, up from 3.6 per cent in 2015.

For national and international governments, IT spending as a percentage operating expense was 9.4 per cent in 2016, up from 8.6 per cent in 2015.

Howard acknowledged that austerity was hitting some governments’ budgets more than others, but that they would end up “lagging behind” if they don’t make boosting their IT budgets a priority.