Changes in the work environment have created a significant gap between the current state of federal IT and the demands and expectations for its future state.
A large and growing share of business leaders and users are demonstrating greater knowledge and confidence in technology selection. Consequently, they will play a bigger role in obtaining and managing technology for themselves without specific oversight and control from the IT department.
Increasingly, business partners are leading more of their own technology initiatives.
In the next three years, the realities of the new work environment, budget pressures and expanding expectations for IT will present critical opportunities for CIOs and other federal IT leaders to:
- Establish IT as a broker, not a builder. IT’s primary contribution must shift from being an internal developer of custom solutions to being an adviser and integrator of externally developed solutions.
- Promote enterprise-level portfolio management. Government IT budgets are under continued pressure, forcing IT teams to broaden their definition of portfolio boundaries to optimize assets and take an enterprise wide approach to achieve efficiencies.
- Use IT to drive employee productivity. CEB research shows that almost two-thirds of employees give failing grades to the productivity tools offered at their organizations.
- Transition to true risk management. Security’s success is no longer based solely on the implementation of foundational technical controls and the ability to protect the perimeter from external threats..
- Facilitate better decisions from big data. The exponential growth of information sources and rapid changes in demand have created difficulties for prioritizing cross-functional and cross-agency information needs.
IT leaders need to assume responsibility for proactively stewarding change for government IT.
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