The positions of chief information technology officer and chief technology officer are seen as irrelevant in driving digital transformation, according to public sector leaders.
Research by polling firm iGov Survey on behalf of supplier Ancoris, revealed that only 4.2% of those holding senior positions in public bodies see the roles as the drivers of change.
This compared to 59% who said that their organisation’s chief executive was responsible for pushing the modernisation of online services.
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Duncan Farley, head of business transformation at Ancoris “The low number of people recognising the role of the CIO and CTO in fostering change is worrying.
“Organisations need to enable their IT teams to focus more on the people and process aspect of change in order to fully benefit from technology.”
The report said that CIOs need to make the subtle shift from configuring, deploying and supporting ICT to “embedding” ICT.
“To truly embed IT, CIOs now need a much greater focus on the people and process aspect of change management to fully realise the benefits,” the report said.
“We still come across many examples of organisations running systems in parallel because new solutions were never fully embedded or old systems never decommissioned – not only is this confusing for the users but it’s highly inefficient, leads to increased cost and is near impossible to manage effectively.”
The survey also revealed that 83% believe cuts to budgets caused by austerity are the main catalyst for the modernisation of online services.
In addition, 73% of senior staff believe that cloud technology could help their organisation, with mobile listed as the new technology most adopted within organisations’ ICT strategies.
Almost two-thirds plan to introduce both cloud and collaboration technologies as part of their IT strategy, but only 36% are including big data.
