Gartner has identified the top 10 strategic technologies that it recommends government CIOs to have a plan for in 2016. They include IoT, digital workplace, and multichannel citizen engagement.
The concept of “doing more with less” has dictated government IT spending over nearly a decade and shows no signs of relenting. A recent study by Gartner shows that spending by national, federal and local governments worldwide on technology products and services is expected to grow a slight 0.3 percent to US$430.1 billion in 2016. This is a turnaround after a 5.2 percent decrease in 2015.
According to Gartner, such phenomenon has in many ways stifled introduction of new, innovative technologies that can help governments streamline operations and better respond to citizens. “In the digital service economy, governments must make strategic investments in IT or risk perpetuating suboptimal business and service models that are financially unsustainable in the long term,” said Rick Howard, VP of research at Gartner. “Government CIOs who are too slow to adopt the technology innovations that are transforming private sector service industries will increase business risk and cost, while compromising the mission of their organizations.”
Against that backdrop, Gartner has identified the top 10 strategic technologies that it recommends government CIOs to have a plan for in 2016. They are listed as follows:
1. Digital Workplace
The adoption of digital workplace is a recommended business strategy to boost engagement by employees who are increasingly digitally literate. The digital workplace also promotes collaborative work styles and supports a decentralized, mobile work environment.
2. Multichannel Citizen Engagement
Delivering an effective citizen experience requires using data to capture and understand the needs and desires of the citizen, leveraging effective social media and communications to actively engage citizens, and allowing the citizen to engage on his or her own terms. Adopting a citizen-centric information management strategy with multichannel citizen engagement opportunities will deliver quantifiable benefits.
3. Open Any Data
Open data policies make license-free data available in machine-readable formats to anyone who has the right to access it without any requirement for identification or registration.
4. Citizen e-ID
As government becomes more digitalized, digital identity will need to become more reliable in order to act as the core for all digital transactions. Citizen electronic identification (e-ID) will serve that purpose.
5. Analytics Everywhere
The pervasive use of analytics at all stages of business activity and service delivery — analytics everywhere — allows leading government agencies to shift from the dashboard reporting of lagging indicators to autonomous business processes and business intelligence (BI).
6. Smart Machines
In practice, smart machines are a diverse combination of digital technologies that do what we once thought only people could do. Government IT leaders must explore smart machines as enhancements to existing business practices, and possibly as foundations for new public services.
7. Internet of Things
Government business models are emerging that take advantage of the IoT; for example, pay-for-use or subscription-based taxation models, smart waste bin collection on city streets, and the remote monitoring of elderly patients in assisted-living settings.
8. Digital Government Platforms
Governments face constant pressure to improve service delivery and save costs. Adopting digital platforms reduces effort and facilitates user-centric design.
9. Software-Defined Architecture
Software-defined architecture (SDA) inserts an intermediary between the requester and the provider of a service so that the service can change more dynamically. Applying the technique to software architecture improves the manageability and agility of the code so that the organization can respond to the fluidity requirements of digital government and the IoT.
10. Risk-Based Security
Government CIOs must adopt a threat-aware, risk-based security approach that allows governments to make knowledgeable and informed decisions about risks in a holistic fashion, allowing for more sound decisions about risks and their impacts on government missions.