2019 CGI Client Global Insights for Central and Federal Government

Annually, CGI leaders around the world meet face-to-face with business and IT executives to gather their perspectives on the trends affecting their enterprises, including business and IT priorities, IT spending and investment plans. In 2019, we conducted in-person interviews with 221 client executives in central and federal government who report that becoming a digital organization remains top of mind, cybersecurity continues as a constant factor, and data analytics is the fastest growing area of innovation investment.

Becoming digital to meet citizen expectations remains in focus

2019 top trends by impact
Year-on-year trend comparison

Becoming digital to meet increasing citizen expectations continues this year as the most impactful trend for central and federal government executives. Protecting through cybersecurity holds steady at second, as last year.

2019 Central government top trends by impact

Assuring regulatory compliance rises from fourth to third, switching positions with flat budgets and economic lags constricting spend, which declines from third to fourth.

Becoming a digital organization to meet increasing citizen expectations was the top trend in 2018, followed by cybersecurity, addressing flat budgets, regulatory compliance and greater use of cloud.

2018 year-on-year comparison - Protecting through cybersecurity was the top industry trend for 2018

Key findings

Strategies taking time to produce results

Central government digital transformation 2019 — *Includes enterprise strategy and enterprise strategy extending to external ecosystem

Eighty-three percent of central and federal government clients interviewed indicate they have a digital strategy in place. Of these executives, 21% have operationalized their strategy, while 62% are still building or launching a strategy. Only 15% indicate having a strategy that is producing results; and, of those with an enterprise strategy, only 12% report it is producing results.

Explore how organizations are gaining value from their enterprise digital transformation strategy.

Cultural change and change management is the top challenge

While 85% of executives cite cultural change and change management as the top challenge in implementing their digital transformation strategy, only 7% are creating change management programs.

Nearly 70% are using the cloud

Central government cloud usage 2019 — Percentages represent "yes" answers. Executives can select multiple cloud usage types. "No" and "other" answers are not shown.

This year we asked central and federal government executives to share how they are using cloud-based solutions, and 33% are using them for their own organization, 6% for citizens/customers, and 30% for both. Additionally, they indicated how their organization’s cloud usage is divided between private, public and hybrid clouds (as shown in the above chart). When asked if they have mechanisms in place to locate where key data assets are stored in the cloud, 30% report they do not have clarity on this question.

Benchmarking clients’ satisfaction with their own IT organization

For the second year, business and IT executives interviewed ranked their satisfaction with their own IT organizations based on the 10 key attributes of a world-class IT organization. When it comes to alignment of IT services to business needs, central and federal government business and IT leaders have lower overall satisfaction than do executives in other industries, including the government sector as a whole.

CGI can provide clients with a discussion of all available benchmarking, including each client’s positioning, on topics such as digital maturity, IT spending, IT satisfaction, innovation investments and more. Contact us to learn more.

Learn how CGI helps clients on their journey to world-class IT.