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Barriers Still Hindering Government Adoption of New Technologies

Suaad Sait

Although nearly all government respondents (92%) in a new study by SolarWinds indicated that adopting significant new technologies is important to their agencies’ long-term success, significant barriers are still hindering progress.

IT plays a vital role in today’s federal agency operations, for everything from civilian-facing websites to military missions. But agencies can only progress and perform as quickly as IT and new technology enables them to. While technology adoption is a high priority in the public sector, offering more opportunity to streamline productivity and reduce cost, government IT organizations must ensure they are empowering IT pros to overcome barriers that they have traditionally faced in implementing and using that technology so they can see results right away.

While federal IT pros still face many barriers during procurement, deployment and implementation of new technology, over 90 percent of respondents said their agencies’ end-users were negatively affected by performance or availability issues with mission-critical technology in the last year.

Budget Constraints, End-User Impact Identified as Top Barriers to Technology Adoption

■ A majority (78%) of respondents cited budget limitations as their No. 1 barrier for IT adoption.

■ Only 7 percent of respondents indicated that their agency and end-users were not affected at all during the last significant new technology implementation.

■ Over half of the respondents also indicated that security/compliance concerns (55%), the need to continue supporting old, legacy technology (53%), and shortage of IT personnel (51%) were among their top barriers to adoption.

■ Other top barriers include the inability to convince decision makers of need and/or benefit (47%) and lack of IT empowerment (37%).

CIO Involvement Falls Short; More Budget, Staff and Time Still Needed

Empowering IT departments to overcome barriers and drive the success of their agencies and end users through technology adoption often starts with the CIO. While respondents’ perceptions of their CIOs are mostly positive, almost half of the respondents (47%) still need more or better resources such as budget, staff or time for projects.

■ Most IT pros consider the CIO’s primary role to be budget approvals (54%) and strategic council and guidance (47%), while only 38 percent noted that their CIO is involved in all areas of IT.

■ However, respondents indicated that they still need more or better training and development (31%), greater IT department autonomy (30%), stronger CIO support when liaising with other agency leaders (24%), more or better strategic counsel and guidance from the CIO (24%), and more timely CIO approvals (24%).

Survey Methodology: The annual SolarWinds IT Trends Report consists of survey-based research that explores trends, developments and movements related to and directly affecting IT and IT professionals. The findings of this year’s report are based on a survey fielded in December 2014, which yielded responses from 123 IT practitioners, managers and directors in the U.S. and Canada from the public sector.

Suaad Sait is EVP Products and Markets at SolarWinds.

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Barriers Still Hindering Government Adoption of New Technologies

Suaad Sait

Although nearly all government respondents (92%) in a new study by SolarWinds indicated that adopting significant new technologies is important to their agencies’ long-term success, significant barriers are still hindering progress.

IT plays a vital role in today’s federal agency operations, for everything from civilian-facing websites to military missions. But agencies can only progress and perform as quickly as IT and new technology enables them to. While technology adoption is a high priority in the public sector, offering more opportunity to streamline productivity and reduce cost, government IT organizations must ensure they are empowering IT pros to overcome barriers that they have traditionally faced in implementing and using that technology so they can see results right away.

While federal IT pros still face many barriers during procurement, deployment and implementation of new technology, over 90 percent of respondents said their agencies’ end-users were negatively affected by performance or availability issues with mission-critical technology in the last year.

Budget Constraints, End-User Impact Identified as Top Barriers to Technology Adoption

■ A majority (78%) of respondents cited budget limitations as their No. 1 barrier for IT adoption.

■ Only 7 percent of respondents indicated that their agency and end-users were not affected at all during the last significant new technology implementation.

■ Over half of the respondents also indicated that security/compliance concerns (55%), the need to continue supporting old, legacy technology (53%), and shortage of IT personnel (51%) were among their top barriers to adoption.

■ Other top barriers include the inability to convince decision makers of need and/or benefit (47%) and lack of IT empowerment (37%).

CIO Involvement Falls Short; More Budget, Staff and Time Still Needed

Empowering IT departments to overcome barriers and drive the success of their agencies and end users through technology adoption often starts with the CIO. While respondents’ perceptions of their CIOs are mostly positive, almost half of the respondents (47%) still need more or better resources such as budget, staff or time for projects.

■ Most IT pros consider the CIO’s primary role to be budget approvals (54%) and strategic council and guidance (47%), while only 38 percent noted that their CIO is involved in all areas of IT.

■ However, respondents indicated that they still need more or better training and development (31%), greater IT department autonomy (30%), stronger CIO support when liaising with other agency leaders (24%), more or better strategic counsel and guidance from the CIO (24%), and more timely CIO approvals (24%).

Survey Methodology: The annual SolarWinds IT Trends Report consists of survey-based research that explores trends, developments and movements related to and directly affecting IT and IT professionals. The findings of this year’s report are based on a survey fielded in December 2014, which yielded responses from 123 IT practitioners, managers and directors in the U.S. and Canada from the public sector.

Suaad Sait is EVP Products and Markets at SolarWinds.

APM

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64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...

Cloud computing has transformed how we build and scale software, but it has also quietly introduced one of the most persistent challenges in modern IT: cost visibility and control ... So why, after more than a decade of cloud adoption, are cloud costs still spiraling out of control? The answer lies not in tooling but in culture ...

CEOs are committed to advancing AI solutions across their organization even as they face challenges from accelerating technology adoption, according to the IBM CEO Study. The survey revealed that executive respondents expect the growth rate of AI investments to more than double in the next two years, and 61% confirm they are actively adopting AI agents today and preparing to implement them at scale ...

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A major architectural shift is underway across enterprise networks, according to a new global study from Cisco. As AI assistants, agents, and data-driven workloads reshape how work gets done, they're creating faster, more dynamic, more latency-sensitive, and more complex network traffic. Combined with the ubiquity of connected devices, 24/7 uptime demands, and intensifying security threats, these shifts are driving infrastructure to adapt and evolve ...

Image
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The development of banking apps was supposed to provide users with convenience, control and piece of mind. However, for thousands of Halifax customers recently, a major mobile outage caused the exact opposite, leaving customers unable to check balances, or pay bills, sparking widespread frustration. This wasn't an isolated incident ... So why are these failures still happening? ...

Cyber threats are growing more sophisticated every day, and at their forefront are zero-day vulnerabilities. These elusive security gaps are exploited before a fix becomes available, making them among the most dangerous threats in today's digital landscape ... This guide will explore what these vulnerabilities are, how they work, why they pose such a significant threat, and how modern organizations can stay protected ...

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...