Government early adopters report IT productivity boost

Broadband, IP network and storage consolidation projects have been identified as leading productivity improvements in government organisations "in the past few years", a Telstra study has found.

The survey of 200 federal, state and local government and statutory authorities found that 54 percent saw productivity increases from broadband networks, primarily in the area of application delivery.

About 40 percent identified the consolidation of data storage into fewer sites or a single site as a valuable strategy.

Unified communications also performed strongly with just under one-third of respondents believing it had positively impacted their productivity.

Outsourced application hosting, however, did not rank highly among those surveyed. Only 15 percent saw productivity improvements from "outsourced hosting of data and applications" and only nine percent said the same for software-as-a-service or cloud computing.

The cloud computing statistic could be simply a result of lack of early adoption of technology among government departments. 

Between seven and 16 percent of those surveyed said they liked "to be one of the first to use a new product or technology."

The study also found that 29 percent of government organisations that were early adopters of technology were also likely to say their productivity had "increased a lot or a great deal" over the same period.

By contrast, those that adopted a ‘wait-and-see' approach were most likely to see productivity improve either "a little or not at all."

The lion's share of government organisations - apart from local governments who were most likely slowest to adopt ICT - said they liked "to be using new products but don't have budget to invest".