Despite the fact that digital business initiatives are high on government agendas, a new survey from Gartner has revealed that governments' ability to scale these initiatives is increasingly slowly and their progress lags behind that of other industries.
The research firm surveyed 372 digital decision makers from the US, Canada, UK, Australia, India and Singapore across six industries (financial services, government, manufacturing, retail, healthcare and education) to compile its digital business survey.
According to Gartner, half of the government respondents to the survey are looking to digital government to support a combination of transformation and optimisation goals. However, the other half is focusing on a single goal with 33 per cent prioritising optimisation while 17 per cent are making transformation their primary focus.
Stages of digital transformation
The firm believes the road to digital transformation is made up of five stages: desire, designing, delivering, scaling and harvesting.
Research director at Gartner, Dean Lacheca provided further insight on which stage governments believe to be on, saying:
“Ninety-one per cent of government respondents consider themselves at one of the first three stages, which focus on the development and introduction of new services. Only 9 per cent 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.”
Ecosystems are also playing a large part in helping government organisations scale their digital business. Collaboration with partners such as employees, citizens, consumers, startups, digital giants and service providers was also found to play a major role in scaling the benefits of digital government.
Gartner's survey shows that government respondents already use a range of business ecosystems with over half saying they use third-part developers to deliver value to citizens.
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