Struggling to Scale Digital Across Your Government Organization? Here Are Actions You Can Take Today.

Whether battling cultural challenges within an organization, expanding leadership to help ensure digitization is happening, or evolving with legacy systems and processes, there’s still a long way to go to scale digital across government. According to a Gartner survey, 55% of digital government programs are failing to scale.

“Citizens expect results; they are not interested in effort,” says Gartner Senior Director Analyst Dean Lacheca, speaking at the virtual Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo™ 2021 for the APAC region. “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.”

Download now: The 10 Common Traits of a Master Government CIO

For government CIOs, it’s worth conducting an accurate assessment of digital maturity to gain insight into the work that still needs to be done. 

Assessing your digital maturity does more than just level-set your reality. It provides valuable insight that informs your strategic planning by: 

• Highlighting areas of potential focus for programs
• Communicating the benefits of digital to policymakers and stakeholders
• Justifying budget requests and prioritizing investments

Consider the following near-term actions you can take to get started:  

1. Align digital priorities to those of the community and government leadership.
2. Recognize quick wins by identifying and acting on urgent and immediate opportunities that can be addressed with digital solutions.
3. Work with like-minded leaders from across the organization to eliminate or mitigate constraints.
4. Incorporate agility into the information and technology operating model to allow the reallocation of IT resources according to shifting executive leadership priorities.