Ovum’s third bi-annual roadshow

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA: This is the third year that Ovum has run its bi-annual tour of Australia and New Zealand where Dr Steve Hodgkinson and Kevin Noonan, Ovum’s Public Sector Research Directors present their latest public sector ICT research perspectives over breakfast. Attendance numbers are growing, with over 190 executives attending sessions in Wellington, Adelaide, Perth, Canberra, Sydney or Brisbane in March.

Hodgkinson provided an introduction to the emergence of smart city strategies and described their relevance to the e-government strategies of agencies in this region.

Hodgkinson said: “The drive for smarter cities is being fuelled by global growth in the number of urban dwellers and the imperatives for cities to leverage ICT in order to overcome challenges of environmental, economic and social sustainability. These challenges are exacerbated by the phenomenal pace of new city building in Asia and India and the massive investments being made in a new style of shining new modern technology intensive city.”

While our cities are, in comparison, more mature Australian and New Zealand agencies need to tune in to smart cities trends in order to identify a new generation of city building solutions - many of which are being implemented as scalable, shareable, cloud services. Smarter cities will leverage proven solutions rather than reinventing the wheel locally, and will harness the rising power of digital society to co-produce public services and engage citizens in the creation of sustainable places to live, work, learn and play.

Kevin Noonan presented the results of seven one-on-one interviews with government CIOs around Australia. Drawing on international survey research undertaken by Ovum earlier this year, Federal and State government CIOs were each probed through confidential interviews about their strategic intentions for the coming year.

Noonan stated: “Some agencies were caught in a cost-cutting spiral, and were directing significant effort to defending their diminishing budgets. Life is very tough for these agencies, as they hold the line against unfunded work. Unfortunately business areas have begun to develop ingenious methods for bypassing IT, especially where it relates to leading edge agendas such as mobile technologies, collaboration tools and cloud computing.”

Other agencies have managed to break free. In these agencies, IT is now typically playing a big part in agency-wide restructures and in delivering productivity agendas. These agencies exhibited a number of common characteristics:

* CIOs are no longer focusing on IT role definitions, hierarchy, and procedures and are redirecting efforts to working as part of the executive team to deliver outcomes.
* Package solutions (such as COTS) are being used in preference to bespoke solutions.
* Agencies are differentiating disruptive technologies and focusing their efforts on the bigger picture of disruptive business processes.
* Governance arrangements in most agencies have evolved over time.
* An important observation is that the size of projects being undertaken is not necessarily a good indicator of successful outcomes.
* The role of the Business Owner has become problematic in some agencies.
* In a world where packaged solutions are preferred, interoperability becomes a key requirement.
* Today, many vendor partners have product ranges with well-developed strategic directions.