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With the recent economic stagnation, the need for government agencies to embrace technological innovation has been at all time high. As the world comes out of the global pandemic, citizens expect their governments to deliver critical services to solve their problems.

Even though the public sector is willing to embrace technology, but there are multiple factors that contribute to the delays and derailments in their tech buying-cycle.

In the last two months of 2021, 1,120 executives were surveyed by the highly credible technological research and consulting firm, Gartner. The survey constituted a good mix of both private and public sector executives. It was regarding their respective organizations’ large-scale technologies buying initiatives.

48% of the surveyed public sector organization executives stated that they faced moderate to significant delays, to the tune of seven months, in six or more of their buying processes.

A senior analyst at Gartner, Dean Lacheca, said that the public sector is facing the toughest of challenges in the acquisition of technology, primarily due to various laws and policies at different jurisdictional levels. The public sector can’t rule out being subjected to a plethora of prosecutions if they don’t abide by the law.

Gartner survey also found that due to these reasons, the public sector has the longest average buying cycle for the purchase of various technologies.

As far as the C-level executives are concerned, the government sector sees less involvement (41%) in the purchase of technology, as compared to the private sector (55%).

It has been observed that the government-level equivalent of the executive governance body is under huge influence of evaluation results, and the opinions of subject matter experts. 46% of the public sector technology buying teams mostly consist of lower-tier operational staff.

Gartner has pointed out the following factors, occurring before the procurement process even begins, which tend to cause the maximum delays in the government buying cycles.

  • Development of a strong business case (74%)
  • Added research and evaluations, due to sudden scope changes (76%)
  • Budgetary agreements (75%)

It is quite evident from the above stats that both controllable and un-controllable factors hinder the process of government buying cycles, particularly when we cannot put a defined timeline on external factors.

It has been implied by 68% of the surveyed public cloud executives that a lot of these delays were the result of technology provider’s fault. These tech-providers did not give the necessary details about a particular product, or its implementation requirements, on time.

It is important to note that certain technology providers are in a better position to give a fact-based and objective assessment to the public sector organization’s buying team.

Gartner goes on to suggest that technology providers must follow the recommendations that are listed below.

  • They should develop and maintain a list of public sector reference clients, that can be accessed quickly, in a seamless manner.
  • The tech-providers must also create a diverse library of product collaterals and security.
  • They should also focus on value assessment.

 

The future role of technology is yet to be fully witnessed in the public sector. One thing is for sure though; a lot of government agencies have never been keener to adopt technology to improve their operations.

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