Ramona Adams
A Unisys-sponsored survey has found that 69 percent of federal, state and local government respondents have started or are interested to adopt digital government programs while 31 percent are skeptical of the programs’ benefits.
Unisys said Thursday 57 and 35 percent of respondents respectively rated themselves as “very concerned” and “somewhat concerned” over digital government’s potential security risks, while 47 and 41 percent claimed to be “very concerned” and “somewhat concerned” on the lack of staff expertise.
“Beyond the direct benefits offered by digital government, there are multiple indirect benefits to government agencies in terms of more mature capabilities and forward-looking workplace cultures,” said Casey Coleman, group vice president for federal civilian agencies at Unisys.
“For these reasons, we believe more agencies will take the appropriate security measures and embrace digital government in the future,” Coleman added.
The benefits of digital government on internal business processes and services delivery were rated as “very important” by 66 and 65 percent of the respondents, respectively, Unisys noted.
Forty-five percent of the surveyed individuals ranked citizen participation as “very important.”
Fifty-five percent of the respondents agreed that their agency wants to provide a “more innovative” digital government service while 45 percent were neutral or disagreed, the report found.
Unisys’ study described digital government as the process where agencies apply digital technologies such as cloud, virtualization, data analytics and mobility to deliver services to citizens, stakeholders and public sector employees.
