Comparing Private and Public Sector on Information Systems Development and Maintenance Efficiency

Abstract

Abstract. This paper provides a comparison between public and private organizations on key figures relative to the information systems support activities. Many have claimed that public sector has a less satisfactory conduct of information system support than private sector. In this article we present selected data from survey investigations performed among Norwegian organizations on how they conduct information systems development and maintenance. This investigation has earlier been compared with similar investigations of this sort. A major finding from the previous comparisons is that even if we witness large changes in the underlying implementation technology and approaches used, a number of aspects such as the overall percentage of time used for maintaining and evolving systems in production compared to time used for development is remarkably stable. When we compare public and private organizations in the last survey, we find a small difference on some variables, but these are not statistically significant, thus cannot be used to conclude that IT development and evolutions is conducted more poorly in public sector than in private sector.

Digitalization of swedish government agencies

“…Two exceptions, both in the nancial sector, are the Financial Supervisory Authority and the National Government Employee Pensions Board -two anomalies that constitute interesting directions for future work. Nevertheless, our results con rm the conclusion by Krogstie [19], i.e., so ware development in the public appears as mature as in the private sector.…”

“…Some research claims that public sector projects tend to be poorly conducted compared to its private sector counterparts [16]. On the other hand, in a study conducted in Norway in 2012, a number of project indicators were compared between public and private organizations, and the authors found no signi cant di erences [19]. Nonetheless, there are indeed contextual di erences between soware projects in the public and private sectors.…”