Dr Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director, Public Sector Technology

Momentum for cloud services adoption in government grew solidly in 2013 and looks certain to accelerate in 2014. We believe that growth in cloud services adoption by agencies will drive a change in the core logic of whole-of-government IT strategy. Cloud services offer a less risky win-win-win path towards IT modernization and intra-agency collaboration. Big bad experimental whole-of-government IT projects are dead. Long live the new logic of cloud services: find solutions that work well in individual agencies and then adopt them more broadly across multiple agencies. Simple.

Stop the horror story of whole-of-government IT strategy experiments

IT strategy in government too often resembles a horror story because of a passion for big projects which become mad experiments that go bad. Under pressure to cut costs, whole-of-government CIOs pursued adventurous and experimental shared services and common application and infrastructure strategies. While the …