It’s Time for Government to Shift from “Legacy First” to “Digital First”

We all suspected that the heavy presence of legacy technology was holding government back from truly digitizing their operations, but now data confirms it. A new report by Gartner – the 2015 CIO Agenda – which surveyed over 2,800 businesses worldwide and includes responses from 343 government CIOs finds that legacy modernization is problematic:

“The burden of legacy technologies in government puts innovation on a path of incremental improvement when agility and quick solution delivery is expected,” said Rick Howard, research director at Gartner.

It’s not a new observation. In fact, a 2011 study by MeriTalk and the Unisys Center for Innovation in Government found that agencies spend “almost half of their annual federal IT budgets…on supporting legacy applications and that about 47 percent of the government’s existing IT applications are based on legacy technology that needs modernization.”
 

It’s Time to Flip from “Legacy First” to “Digital First”:

Gartner says that government CIOs must flip from “Legacy First” to “Digital First”:

To demonstrate ‘digital now, digital first’ leadership in government, CIOs must flip their approach to managing IT from the inside-out perspective of legacy constraints to the outside-in view of citizen experience. It’s all about starting with the digital world and what is possible — thinking cloud, mobile and situational context first — and then considering, ‘How do we get there from here?’ using information and technology.

Although governments worldwide rank infrastructure and data center technology as their firm priority for 2015, Gartner suggests that, given that vendors are capturing more of the public sector cloud market, it is highly probably that government IT organizations will slowly reduce their role as infrastructure providers and data center operators.
 

Moving from ”Why Cloud?” to  “Why Not Cloud?”

Instead, they will serve as a broker of those foundational services and orient IT capabilities from “legacy first” to “digital first” by inserting a “Why not cloud?” step into all planning.”

By shifting the management and provisioning of infrastructure to centralized government shared-service entities or to viable commercial vendors, government CIOs can lead by example and update IT management techniques to adopt the design-for-change mindset that is essential in the digital age,” said Mr. Howard. “In relatively short time, cloud has moved from a concept, to a possibility, to a viable option and, for a small minority of government CIOs, is now first choice when a project comes along.”

More detailed analysis is available in the Gartner report “2015 CIO Agenda: A Government Perspective.” The report is available on Gartner’s website at http://www.gartner.com/document/2974423.

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