How IT Resilience Has Become An Effective Cost-Cutter For State Governments

By Gary Marks, president, Opengear

They say you have to spend money to make money, but having to spend money to save money is oftentimes equally true. In a paper published by Management Science — Do CIO IT Budgets Explain Bigger or Smaller Governments? Theory and Evidence from U.S. State Governments — researchers were able to demonstrate this fact as it relates to government spending on IT. According to the study, “It is estimated that on average, a $1 increase in state CIO budgets is associated with a reduction of as much as $3.49 in state overall expenditures.”

So what exactly accounts for these impressive investment dividends, and what areas of IT are producing the most substantial ROI? Many successful state government technology programs, ones that pay for themselves and then some, do so by adding new efficiencies to common IT processes. IT investments can streamline government processes by introducing online delivery of services and by automating interfaces and systems that were previously handled manually. Innovations that have stormed the private sector, such as the ability to make payments by smartphone, have created expectations among citizens that the public sector should provide comparably easy-to-use services.

The area of IT investment offering the greatest ROI for state government organizations, though, is network infrastructure. The ability to dependably deliver critical services online is at the heart of IT-driven efficiency, dually benefitting both the users and government budgets. At the same time, network failures are extraordinarily expensive.

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