According to Jan Duffy, Research Director, IDC Government Insights, EMEA "This year was a particularly difficult year for governments across Western Europe. Economic conditions in some cases were dire and in many cases, governments are considering alternative models of service delivery as part of their ongoing plans to deal with longer term financial austerity, but the challenge is balancing service delivery with reduced expenditure. These challenging conditions have had a significant impact on IT spending in the region and on our 2012 Top Ten Government Predictions. In 2012 governments in Western Europe will take a hard look at IT operations with the goal of becoming smarter, focusing on Smart IT Delivery, Smart Information Management, and Smart IT Procurement and Commissioning. These three themes are focused on answering the question of "What makes government IT smart?" and they frame our 2012 Top Ten Government Predictions."
IDC Government Insights' Top 10 Predictions for the EMEA public sector for 2012 and beyond are:
1. In Western Europe 2012 will see a dramatic increase in government use of private cloud services.
2. The perception of lower cost and increased flexibility will drive higher government interest in the use of open source software in 2012.
3. As the belt-tightening continues there will be a marked increase in the adoption of shared services in many shapes and sizes at all levels of government, across all public sector organizations, departments and functions.
4. Once the poster-child of Green IT, virtualization and consolidation are now considered key to optimized resource use and cost reduction and we expect governments to accelerate the reduction in the number of servers and data centers.
5. Interest in BPO will increase across governments in Europe, particularly if there are obvious cost savings.
6. Governments will continue to re-write the procurement and commissioning rules and ICT and related services will be subjected to changes including innovative funding, multi-party joint ventures, pay as you go, and cross-agency contracts.
7. To minimize the risk of inappropriate public sector spending, in 2012 we expect to see more contracts based on payment for priority-based measurable outcomes.
8. Increased use of cloud computing will require more time to be spent on reviewing the terms and conditions of service-level agreements to ensure needed services are properly covered.
9. The volume of digital information will continue to grow but, in a world of changing technologies and increasing threat sophistication, government investment in organizing, managing, and securing this data will receive high priority and continue to increase.
10. Governments will develop plans that allow for easy access and analysis of both data and content to better support the most appropriate distribution of social, healthcare, and educational services and resources.