Impact of Emerging Technologies on the Public Sector

By Mike Webb, CIO, National Museum Of Australia

Mike Webb, CIO, National Museum Of Australia

It shouldn't really come as a surprise that the role and remit of a CIO has changed significantly in recent times. Sure, everyone still needs a PC, access to emails, the internet and a place to store files, but the acceleration of cloud services, the expectation of access to data from any device, anywhere, and the increasingly tech savvy end users now force CIO's out of their comfort zone. Gone are the days when keeping systems online was enough to win favour in your organisation. Now, more than ever, business value is derived from the asset of its data holdings and using data insights to form a better decision-making process within an organisation.

CIO is a tough gig when efficiency dividend is part of the budgetary landscape, restraints exist with the number of resources that can be engaged, users can purchase IT services without necessarily even engaging IT, and security is a constantly moving target. Market trends like cloud, DevOps, and IoT offer CIO's an opportunity to solve some of their current problems, but experience shows benefits are often much more difficult to achieve than vendors will lead us to believe. So where does that leave us?

Well, the first thing that struck me when I moved into a cultural institution within the public sector was just how efficiently IT can run when it has to.

It is leveraging wireless for analytics of visitor movements within galleries to inform decisions on gallery development and provide a platform for a next generation digital museum experience

Funding just isn't available to continue with incremental change so innovation is accelerated through necessity. Migration of utility IT services like email, telephony and retail platforms to cloud services is necessary for operating efficiencies, but most importantly, it frees up the limited IT resources on hand to focus their efforts on innovations that matter to the business. For an institution like the National Museum of Australia, this is leveraging data to improve interactions with visitors, members, donors, and partners. It is leveraging wireless for analytics of visitor movements within galleries to inform decisions on gallery development and provide a platform for a next generation digital museum experience. It is enhancing digital collections to develop a capability to allow the organisation to keep pace and stay relevant with younger generations by interacting in ways in which they expect to receive information.

Collaboration within the sector is becoming increasingly important. Cultural institutions are full of dedicated, passionate people, but in organisations of only a few hundred. This means there are great opportunities to share and collaborate with other cultural institutions and to leverage off each other and improve our collective capabilities. This is particularly true for corporate IT services and digital records management. The Museum is collaborating with a number of other cultural institutions to consolidate services, improve the quality of services, and introduce economies through coordinated services and procurements. It’s an approach, which solves the problems being faced together across a group of similar organisations. Why keep reinventing the wheel by repeating the same commodity IT service when cost savings through consolidation are available?

I’ve always had the view that if you’re not looking at continuous improvement and new technologies, you probably shouldn’t be in IT. There are some exceptions to this of course, but cultural institutions are not one of them. Seizing opportunities to support better decision making from data insights, collaborating with other institutions, and new digital communications channels are the key to position IT where the business needs it to be.