A comprehensive methodology for establishing and sustaining government chief information officer function

Abstract

The Government Chief Information Officer (GCIO) function is an international best practice for successful adoption of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) within and across government organizations, for managing the impact of ICT on government and its partners, and for maximizing the benefits produced by ICT-enabled public governance to citizens. However, many governments around the world, particularly at the local level and in developing countries, lack the capacity, tools and insight required to establish GCIO functions to fit their institutional environment and address local needs, and others had to employ a mix of top-down design, bottom-up growth and trial-and-error. To assist governments in this task, and to fill existing research-policy gap, this paper presents a comprehensive but practical methodology for establishing and sustaining the GCIO function, strongly relying on government-academia collaboration, and presents the validation of this methodology through a national GCIO development project in Colombia (GCIO.CO). The main contribution of this paper is the presentation of a policy-level tool for systematic development of GCIO functions to match local conditions, including project-level implementation framework enabled by government-academia partnership.