Ramona Adams
Grant Thornton‘s public sector business has released two annual surveys that show government information technology executives want to boost IT workforce recruitment and address challenges in IT infrastructure, management and processes.
The advisory firm said Monday its Delivering Results While Preparing for Transition survey focused on 41 federal agency CIOs and other IT officials while The Adaptable State CIO study gathered insight from CIOs across nearly all U.S. states and territories.
State CIOs who developed a cybersecurity disruption response plan have increased to 71 percent in 2016 from 52 percent in 2015, Grant Thornton said.
“Cybersecurity is clearly top-of-mind for state CIOs, and as a result, they are becoming increasingly attentive to protecting essential state IT services,” said Graeme Finley, managing director at Grant Thornton’s state and local public sector practice.
The surveys also found that the state and federal IT workforce challenge centers on the compensation compared with the private sector, bureaucratic rules for hiring and outdated terms and concepts about the workforce.
Eighty-six percent of surveyed federal agencies have appointed a chief data officer to implement data strategy while approximately 33 percent of states have created a CDO role and 20 percent are looking into it, Grant Thornton added.
All federal CIO respondents also claimed they apply Agile methodologies for IT projects while 81 percent of state CIOs expect an increased adoption of Agile or incremental software development approaches in the next two years, the surveys stated.
Grant Thornton partnered with the Professional Services Council to publish the federal CIO survey and with the National Association of Chief Information Officers and CompTIA to release state CIO survey.
