Digitisation is not only affecting more and more sectors of the economy, it is increasingly affecting the public sector. This means that decision makers within the ministries must now develop a strategy for handling the issue. This topic has been addressed by Gartner, the well-known American market research institute that conducted a survey of more than 3,000 CIOs from 98 countries. Because around 15 percent of the respondents came from the public sector, the results allow some interesting conclusions to be drawn about this area.
Data management: the most important investment area for the public sector
The survey outcomes clearly show that digitisation plays a significant role, especially in the public sector. For that group of respondents, 18 percent said that digital transformation is the main challenge facing their agency. This proportion is higher than the response from those in private enterprise. Another question concerned which technologies these decision makers invested in the most. Here, cloud services ranked first with 19 percent, followed by business intelligence, infrastructure and data centres. All these priority areas fall within the data management category, so it is clear that simple and efficient management of data is an important issue for public authorities.
Good data management promotes more efficient working practices
Public offices have to process large amounts of data. It is therefore obvious that sensible data management makes working practices significantly more efficient. Digitisation of documents considerably reduces the administrative workload, but it is important to have a reliable and efficient infrastructure to achieve this. Some authorities rely on their own servers, but data storage in the cloud is becoming increasingly popular. Both alternatives must be grounded upon easy access to the data. This demands suitable interfaces that can allow seamless access and data exchange throughout the working day. This data is not only important for internal processes; it must also be available to provide citizens with information. Again, this is relatively easily achieved with sensible structures for digital data management, and will help to maintain a high level of user-friendliness where it is most appropriate and will be most appreciated.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn.
