What government DDaT buyers really prioritise (and what they don’t): The power of revealed preferences

In the public sector technology marketplace, vendor strategy is often shaped by the most visible signals: survey tick boxes, whitepapers, trend reports, and content marketing downloads. But a download is not a declaration of intent, and what attendees say they "care about" often reflects curiosity rather than commitment. Yet, beneath this surface lies a deeper behavioural reality.

Beyond the surface of stated interests

In June, more than 225 senior leaders from across UK central, devolved and local government did something unusual in a policy and procurement landscape saturated with speculative intent: they chose.

Not in the abstract, but concretely, by selecting, in rank order, the topics they were prepared to dedicate an hour of their time to explore in peer-led, in-depth discussions.
With over 100 topic options spanning our core themes - Digital Transformation, Service Delivery, Government Data, and AI - this wasn’t a theoretical exercise.

Choosing a session meant forgoing others. It meant publicly signalling to peers and colleagues, “this is what matters most to me now.” In behavioural economics, this is the foundation of revealed preferences: actions, not assertions, as the clearest guide to actual priorities.

Time, especially for public sector executives, is a finite and closely guarded resource. Numerous studies have confirmed that when individuals willingly invest substantial time – particularly in multi-hour or peer-group formats – it indicates a level of intent and relevance that goes well beyond the passive engagement of downloads or checkboxes. What emerged from this process was not a reflection of fashion or curiosity, but a hard-edged map of operational urgency.

The priority gap: When interest isn’t intent

It is a common misstep in vendor strategy to mistake broad interest for actionable intent. Yet when public sector leaders are asked not just what they find relevant but what they will prioritise, the signal sharpens.

Our behavioural data from 225 government DDaT executives revealed that some of the most popular topics in unconstrained “interest” selections vanished entirely when delegates were asked to rank what they’d commit time to.

• Ethical AI: Cited by nearly a third of attendees – yet received zero priority rankings.
  
  
• Digital Twins: Flagged by one in five – but not selected as a top discussion by any.
  
  
• Employee experience and generative AI followed the same pattern: high salience in conversation, but no evidence of urgency when choice required trade-off.
  
  

In short, not all interest is created equal. Topics that feel strategically important, or appear frequently in public discourse, are not always the ones that government leaders are ready to invest in, whether that investment is of time, budget, or political capital.

These findings reaffirm the critical distinction between expressed preferences and revealed preferences: the former tells you what buyers are willing to discuss. The latter tells you what they are willing to do.

The weight of commitment: What got chosen

By contrast, a set of themes consistently broke through. Across all respondents, a handful of priorities emerged not just as popular, but as preeminent. These were the topics leaders were most willing to sacrifice other discussions to attend:

• Transformation strategy
• Operational transformation
• Future delivery models
• Data sharing
• AI governance
• User-centric design

These topics earned top rankings again and again across sectors, roles, and remits. They did not merely reflect intellectual alignment, they reflected operational urgency.

“The hardest part of data governance isn’t technology, it’s authority. In a department as complex as ours, success depends on sustained commitment from senior leaders who often have competing priorities. Without that, governance is just a concept on a slide.”
- Senior Civil Servant

This comment, volunteered unprompted, is emblematic of the structural challenges faced in priority areas. It speaks to the kind of institutional friction – and opportunity – that only emerges in domains where delivery is both necessary and hard.

Segmenting demand: Preferences are contextual, not uniform

Once revealed preferences are disaggregated by seniority and organisational type, a more textured map of demand emerges. Senior leaders (Directors, Director Generals, and CxOs) consistently prioritised high-leverage, system-wide themes such as transformation strategy, cross-government insights, and AI governance. These are areas where policy meets infrastructure and strategic risk is highest.

“At this level, you’re not optimising a service, you’re resetting the architecture. The priorities I focus on have to unlock value across the whole organisation, not just patch over gaps.”

- Director of Strategy, Central Government Department

Mid-level and delivery-focused roles, by contrast, leaned into practical executional challenges: digital workplace, process improvement, and data interoperability. These are the daily pain points that stall progress when the strategic isn’t yet fully translated into the operational.

“We feel the strain of legacy and fragmented tooling every day. We’re not debating AI ethics – we’re trying to get systems to talk to each other.”

- Head of Digital Delivery, Local Authority

Departments showed a pronounced appetite for AI use cases suggesting a maturing ambition to move from experimentation to embedded capability. This reflects both the scale of their service obligations and their evolving internal mandates around innovation.

Local authorities prioritised citizen experience and operational transformation, both rooted in the immediacy of front-line service delivery, funding constraints, and the imperative to do more with less.

Arms-length bodies (ALBs) displayed strong interest in service design and joined-up services, but were far less aligned around AI-specific themes, possibly reflecting narrower remits, more specialised functions, and limited discretionary budgets.

“We have to integrate with core departmental systems, but we’re not resourced like they are. So we prioritise design and interoperability over frontier tech.”

- CxO, ALB

This segmentation challenges the persistent fiction of a monolithic “government buyer.” What emerges instead is a layered and role-sensitive demand landscape, one that requires vendors to calibrate their value proposition not just to the public sector, but to the precise locus of intent within it.

Why this matters: Insight beyond intuition

Most vendors operate with only partial visibility, guided by anecdote, assumption, or the echo chamber of downloaded whitepapers and webinar registrations. Traditional market intelligence often relies on what public sector leaders say they care about, not what they are structurally positioned to act upon.
What this behavioural analysis reveals is a more valuable distinction: the gap between acknowledgement and action. Between topics that garner attention, and those that attract investment.

In a market where the cost of engagement is high, and the path to procurement is long and non-linear, understanding this delta becomes a strategic differentiator. Vendors who can interpret revealed preferences will:

• Prioritise the buyers who are themselves prioritising
• Position their solutions within the language of operational urgency
• Avoid the trap of chasing performative interest with no route to implementation

This is not about discarding interest signals, but about ranking them appropriately within the buying journey. A strong go-to-market strategy must be grounded in where the energy and resource is already flowing.

“The difference between a conversation and a commercial opportunity is whether the organisation has made space for change. This data helps us see where they have.”
- Commercial Director, Technology Provider

From insight to action: Explore our deep dives

To support technology suppliers seeking greater alignment, we’ve developed four in-depth insight briefings based on the full behavioural dataset from our last real world gathering of DDaT leaders:

• Digital transformation
• Service delivery
• Government data
• AI in practice

• Priority heatmaps by seniority tier and organisation type
• Breakdowns of revealed vs stated preferences across 100+ curated topics
• Strategic segmentation by department, local authority, and ALB profiles

These briefings are designed not just to inform your GTM and ABM strategies, but to illuminate where interest becomes intent, and where intent hardens into action.

Conclusion: When preference is revealed, so is opportunity

In the complex, competitive world of public sector technology, vendors who engage based on rhetoric will always be outpaced by those who engage based on behaviour.
At Government Transformation Magazine, we are in the business of generating signal, not noise: actual ranked choices, made under real-world constraints, by senior leaders across the public sector. These are not just preferences, they are priorities.
And for those who know how to read them, they are opportunities waiting to be acted upon.

Want to know which departments are already aligned to your value proposition?
Book a 15-minute insight call. We’ll walk you through what your buyers actually prioritised. You can download the reports via the banner below.