Dr Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director, IT, Asia-Pacific

We believe it is time for governments to elevate their policy thinking about cloud services to confront their ICT strategy conundrum. They must address increasing fiscal constraints and disappointment with existing approaches to boosting ICT productivity with an approach that enables cross-agency sharing.

Mature enterprise cloud services are “capitalist economy” shared services that work. Cloud services break the cycle of agency investment in dedicated ICT solutions that are difficult or impossible to share. In contrast, each procurement of cloud services incrementally develops the capacity of the vendor to offer the same service to other agencies.

A policy position of “cloud services first” is a strategic commitment by government to the development of the next generation of shared services.

Let’s get realistic about government’s ICT strategy conundrum

Ovum believes it is time for government policy executives to start considering a more visionary …