All boats rise with the tide. And so it is with the technology and digital implementations of state and territory governments in an era of extraordinary transformation.

In this year’s iTnews State of IT Report, the majority of states improved their ratings. But even for those for whom the rating ultimately remained unchanged, most moved up to the top of the band where even a moderate improvement will lead to a rerating next year.

While you have to register to see the individual rankings of each state and territory, one thing we will reveal is that we have retired the “C” ranking altogether this year.

Key trends

Reflecting the age in which we live, health and cybersecurity were the two biggest drivers of transformation and new investment over the last twelve months.

But there is also a broad shift to building greater in-house digital capability; a recognition not only of how much more work needs to be done but of how tight the technology talent markets remain.

And there is an increased investment in governance, especially regarding the long-term ROI derived from technology projects, as well as in transparency around policies for cybersecurity, cloud, data and privacy.

There has been a slight change in the way we rate the states and territories. Last year we provides a rating of “half” to some of the answers we received to the key questions underpinning the report. This year we have changed that to “Partial” reflecting the fact that that is often a wide spread of progress between an otherwise Yes/No binary rating. That also reflects how we score each site. Each “Partial” rating was scored on a case-by-case basis.

And a final note, in almost all instances our assessment of the rating on each question matched that of the governments themselves. Where there was a difference we opted for our own determination.