Town Hall Bosses Need CIO Focus On Operations, Not Tech

Local government CEOs want CIOs to stop playing with technology and focus on their company’s business goals, a new report says.

According to a report from not-for-profit public sector IT services provider Eduserv, there is an on-going issue with the poor alignment of IT activity to the priorities of the business.

The company held a workshop where it asked CEOs what they wanted IT to do differently, to achieve better results overall. CEOs said that they wanted CIOs to “help make shared service models, demand management and great efficiencies happen”, Computing says.

CEOs also said their IT counterparts are underestimating their knowledge of information technologies. They were frustrated with claims coming from IT – either suppliers or in-house teams – that they can “enable digital services” or “deliver transformation” without specific examples of real business issues solved by technology with measurable outcomes that are relevant to the challenges they face.

“Top of the wish list is for IT to seize the role of innovators and to ensure the organisation has a long-term vision and strategy for IT which embraces the latest tools and ways of working seen elsewhere in the sector,” the report reads.

They also seem to struggle understanding why IT departments lack information on how people access public services they offer, and how they use them.

“While acknowledging the limitations of legacy systems, CEOs could not understand why IT seems to find it so hard to unlock data for wider reuse and to provide better customer insight,” the report reads.