Public sector IT is struggling to keep up with digital transformation

Source – itproportal.com

Public sector IT is suffering from a major crisis in confidence when it comes to the pace of change, new figures have claimed.

Despite the need to implement digital transformation ideas and updates, many organisations are facing several major hurdles, according to the 2017 Public Sector IT Operations Survey from Splunk.

The study found that public sector organisations undergoing digital transformation are losing confidence in the ability of their IT teams to keep tabs on the increasing level of new technologies alongside growing external expectations.

Overall, 78 per cent of the organisations surveyed said that a lack of end-to-end visibility was the biggest hurdle to delivering services effectively, while 68 per cent and 64 per cent reported that skills and resources respectively were major issues.

The survey, which quizzed 1227 public sector IT professionals, also found that on average, it takes 41 hours and 11 staff members to restore IT systems to operational status following an outage, costing an average of £21,846.

Almost one third (31 per cent) believe better network visibility would be the most effective way to strengthen IT operations

“There’s no question that a lack of visibility is a major factor shaking the confidence of IT operations staff and management,” said Kevin Davis, vice president of public sector, Splunk.

“A majority of IT decision makers do not think or are unsure if challenges such as IT troubleshooting, service monitoring, security and business and mission analytics can be addressed using a single set of data. Splunk has helped many of our customers realise this and ultimately become more analytics driven. By giving our customers the ability to ingest data once and use it across their IT infrastructure, public sector organisations can get ahead of IT modernisation programs, ultimately helping them embrace digital transformation.”

However help may be at hand in the form of DevOps strategies, which are helping many businesses achieve success despite the rising complexity of IT challenges facing public sector bodies today. The study found that 54 per cent of organisations expect spending on DevOps to increase next year, while 53 per cent forecast increased investment in cloud operations over the same period

“The confidence gap we are seeing maps to other industry and government technology trends including growing public scrutiny, ever-present resource limitations and rapidly increasing expectations of technology by end-users. There’s never been a more important time for public sector organisations to embrace analytics to help them face and overcome these challenges with data,” said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute.

“It’s a challenging time to work in Government IT, but there are plenty of reasons to be hopeful for the future. It’s not surprising public sector IT leaders are looking to analytics, cloud and DevOps to help accelerate IT performance and management.”