Four Steps Public-Sector CIOs Should Take To Break Down Silos Impeding Innovation

Four steps for public sector CIOs to break down silos impeding innovation.

Government agencies, almost by design, are large and slow-moving. When something goes wrong, the response is often to add another policy and another layer of approvals and reviews. This slows things down even more and frustrates efforts by CIOs and other decision-makers to make informed and timely choices.

Further inhibiting—and complicating—operations, individual mission centers facing bureaucratic barriers often create their own duplicative capabilities, delivered quickly and effectively, but just for their own use. These silos are especially common when it comes to information technology and are given the pejorative label of “Shadow IT” by CIOs and others at the enterprise level who want to assert control over all agency technology.

All is not lost. IT leaders have tools to overcome this friction. There are four necessary steps that public-sector CIOs should take to deliver capabilities at speed:

By empowering the right leaders internally, pushing back against the lowest common denominator and showing results incrementally, CIOs can effectively break down silos and ensure their teams can make informed and timely choices. That will help accelerate innovation securely across public-sector organizations at a time when new approaches and services are needed more urgently than ever.