By : Gartner VP Analyst Bettina Tratz-Ryan,
Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst John Kost
Gartner Sr Director Analyst Milly Xiang
As 2022 unfolds, government leaders and elected officials face enormous challenges, but also opportunities resulting from the pandemic and economic recovery response, changing political demands and continued digital disruption. These macro challenges shape the Top Business Trends in Government for 2022 and the need to exercise strong digital leadership.
These macro challenges set the context for government CIOs, who should use the technology trends to design flexible business, operating and organizational models. The aim is to develop a “line of sight” connection between technology investments and public-policy objectives. This is the only way CIOs can demonstrate that digital investments are not just tactical; they also improve business capabilities and are critical to achieving leadership priorities in an evolving and uncertain environment.
CIOs do not usually have direct authority to control mission outcomes — unless they closely collaborate and co-create outcomes with business leaders. However, the siloed nature of strategies and decision making remains the biggest constraint in the public sector. Other limitations that have traditionally held back digital transformation in government are:
• Low-to-moderate levels of digital maturity
• Rising and diverse citizen expectations
• Risk-averse culture and rigid processes
• Insufficient budgets, skills and talent
• Difficulties scaling ad hoc innovation.
This combination of challenges plus politics and power-plays have made it difficult for government CIOs to scale impacts of an initiative beyond individual pockets of innovation. But going further, governments are, in fact, expected to scale from the digital gains achieved during the pandemic.
Acting under the pressures of macrosocietal challenges while dealing with public-sector constraints leaves government CIOs, figuratively speaking, between a rock and a hard place. By using the technology trends, CIOs should channel those pressures into investments that will improve institutional agility not just within IT, but across the whole organization.
CIOs should not fall into the trap of simply discussing granular technology trends with leadership. The trends should be regarded as means to an end: Leverage insights from these government trends to make a case for investments that turn your organization into a future-ready organization over time (see Figure 1). This applies to any government organization, regardless of geography, tier or sector.
Figure 1: Aiming to Build a Future-Ready Public-Sector Organization Over Time
The following technology trends enable and strengthen the key characteristics of a future-ready public-sector organization. Government CIOs should consider their collective impact on their organizations and include them in their strategic plans for 2022 and beyond. Not doing so risks undermining the quality of government services and the capacity to deliver mission value in the longer run.
Trend: Composable Government Enterprise
By 2024, over 25% of government RFPs for mission-critical IT systems will require solutions architecture and variable licensing that support a composable design approach.
Composability enables governments to focus on citizen-centric services, rather than on the frequently used, siloed, program-centric approach.
Trend: Adaptive Security
By 2025, 75% of government CIOs will be directly responsible for security outside of IT, including operational and mission-critical technology environments.
The adaptive security model is one in which cybersecurity systems operate more like an autonomic biological immune system. The concepts of continuous monitoring, now part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Risk Management Framework, and zero-trust network access (ZTNA) are examples of an adaptive security model. The adaptive security architecture features components for prediction, prevention, detection and response; it forgoes traditional notions of perimeter and assumes there is no boundary for safe and unsafe.
Trend: Digital Identity Ecosystems
By 2023, at least 80% of government services that require citizen authentication will support access through multiple digital identity providers.
By 2024, at least a third of national governments and half of U.S. states will offer citizens mobile-based identity wallets. Only a minority will be interoperable across sectors and jurisdictions.
Citizen digital identity is used to cover mostly online authentication (eID) and electronic signatures in interactions with the government. But the scope and needs for digital identity are quickly expanding beyond those boundaries. Governments are looking to identity proofing, bring your own identity (BYOI), identity wallets, organization and objects identity, and identity ecosystems in order to ensure trusted and convenient access to services.
Trend: Total Experience
By 2023, at least 85% of governments without a total experience (TX) strategy will fail to successfully transform government services.
Total experience (TX) is an approach that combines the disciplines of user experience (UX), citizen/constituent experience (CX), employee experience (EX) and multiexperience (MX) for a more holistic service design and delivery. A TX strategy interlinks digital and nondigital techniques from the CX, EX, UX and MX disciplines to increase citizen and employee confidence in, and satisfaction with, government services.
Trend: Anything as a Service (XaaS)
By 2025, 95% of new IT investments made by government agencies will be made in XaaS solutions.
XaaS encapsulates several categories of IT infrastructure and software services, including those delivered in the cloud as a subscription-based service — such as:
• Software as a service (SaaS)
• Platform as a service (PaaS)
• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
• Business process as a service (BPaaS)
• Unified communications as a service (UCaaS)
Trend: Accelerated Legacy Modernization
By 2025, over 75% of governments will operate more than half of their workloads using hyperscale cloud service providers.By 2024, 75% of governments will have at least three enterprisewide hyperautomation initiatives launched or underway.
A legacy application is an application that is based on outdated technologies, yet remains critical to current operations. Legacy modernization is planned and designed to replace outdated architectures, hardware and software applications with modern equivalents. While there are several approaches to modernization, they universally shift applications to a cloud delivery model as part of modernization.
Trend: Case Management as a Service (CMaaS)
By 2024, government organizations with a composable case management application approach will implement new features at least 80% faster than those without.
Case work is a universal workstyle of government. The integration of government services depends on designing and developing case management solutions as composable products and services that can be shared across the programs, verticals and levels of government. With CMaaS, each process of the case management life cycle is designed as a collection of application building blocks called packaged business capabilities (PBCs).
Trend: Hyperautomation
By 2024, 75% of governments will have at least three enterprisewide hyperautomation initiatives launched or underway.
Hyperautomation in government is a systematic approach by governments to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. It involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools or platforms like AI, robotic process automation, XaaS, low-code/no-code and packaged software.
Trend: Decision Intelligence
By 2023, more than 33% of large organizations will have analysts practicing decision intelligence (including decision modeling).
By 2023, composable decisions that use a data fabric will reduce operational costs and speed time to insight by 20%, while improving explainability.
By 2024, 60% of government AI and data analytics investments aim to directly impact real-time operational decisions and outcomes.
Decision intelligence in government is a practical discipline that improves decision making by explicitly understanding how decisions are made and how their outcomes are evaluated and improved by feedback. To support that, it systematically adopts data-driven technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics at each stage of government activity. Decision intelligence applies to all major levels of decision types: one-off strategic decisions, managerial decisions and high-volume operational decisions.
Trend: Data Sharing as a Program
By 2023, 50% of government organizations will establish formal accountability structures for data sharing, including standards for data structure, quality and timeliness.
By 2023, organizations across all industries, including government, that promote data sharing will outperform their peers on most business value metrics.
Data sharing brings together data sources to allow cross-analysis in order to create additional value for outcomes across government. Data sharing in government overall is often ad hoc, driven by high-profile incidents. By contrast, data sharing as a program is a systematic and scalable approach to enable data reuse and services innovation.