Governments Are Making Slow Progress with Digital Initiatives

Governments’ ability to scale digital initiatives is increasing slowly and progress lags behind that of other industries, according to a survey by Gartner.

Half the government respondents to the survey are looking to digital government to support a combination of transformation and optimization goals. The other half is focusing on a single ambition, either optimization (33 percent) or transformation (17 percent). Gartner distinguishes five stages on the road to digital transformation: desire, designing, delivering, scaling and harvesting.

“Ninety-one percent of government respondents consider themselves at one of the first three stages, which focus on the development and introduction of new services,“ said Dean Lacheca, research director at Gartner. “Only 9 percent identify their digital initiatives as being in the later stages, where the focus is on scaling the service and exceeding the value of comparable nondigital initiatives.“

“The survey results indicate a lack of effectiveness by government organizations at scaling their digital business,“ said Lacheca. “We envisage two possible internal barriers: misalignment between digital strategy and business priorities, and lack of urgency and readiness for change.“

Ecosystems are key to helping government organizations scale their digital business. Collaboration with partners, including employees, citizens, consumers, startups, digital giants and service providers, can play a major role in scaling the benefits of digital government. The survey shows that government respondents already use a range of business ecosystems. Over half of respondents use third-party developers to deliver value to citizens. This figure is substantially higher than that for all the survey respondents (41 percent).

The survey also found that governments are working to improve the digital dexterity of their employees. Forty-eight percent of government respondents rated this critical to the success of their digital business. Nevertheless, 58 percent indicated that they have no formal program to ensure their workforce has the digital skills needed for digital business success.