The global GovTech outlook

Exclusive to GovTech Europe, international tech research and consulting firm Gartner shares insights on the latest global GovTech trends.

Principal Analyst Apeksha Kaushik dives deep into the current state-of-play around the world, from the impact of the pandemic to the key areas of focus for chief information officers (CIOs).

The pandemic’s impact on GovTech

Government organisations continue to face challenges to cope with the new variants of pandemic and recover from it. Public health and security measures – including the vaccination of citizens and their safety – are the top concerns, meaning governments are forced to continue to accelerate their journey of digital transformation.

What we are seeing is that public bodies are accelerating the pace of innovation and adopting commercial technology solutions to meet operational and mission-critical needs. We are seeing innovative use of technology and data.

Technology has become essential for remote working, distance learning, maintaining economies, tracking COVID-19 and keeping governments running. Additionally, however, the crisis has created increased demands for some service supply chains, as well as declining revenue for many government sectors like aviation. This has led to austerity measures and stronger expectations for accountability, as extensive requests for stimulus funding. Automation and the digital delivery of services, wherever feasible, is imperative to sustainability of many government operations.

The lessons learned from the response of government organisations provide the impetus to improve their resilience and build a stronger future for their citizens and enterprises. As this continues, priority will likely be given to investment in digital equity and remote government services.

Digital platforms have also played a key role in this, alongside partners, suppliers and intermediaries. Data sharing and decision intelligence will be a key trend to focus across the sub-sectors like finance, healthcare and manufacturing. This will help in “breaking down the silos”.

With increasing investments in AI, blockchain, hyper-automation, and a renewed emphasis on total experience, citizens have increased their expectations of their governments in delivering services.

The pandemic has only exacerbated the disparity. More citizens want to engage with their governments. More citizens need their governments’ help.

Gartner predicts by 2023, over 60% of governments will have tripled citizen digital services, but less than 25% will be integrated across organisational silos.

What does Gartner data say about challenges for chief information officers (CIOs)?

Our information shows that the most common risk identified for digital transformation is the combination of siloed strategies and decision-making (51%).

The challenges associated with government silos are constantly raised by Gartner clients, and they impact every aspect of digital transformation, from strategy, to funding, to successful implementation. These silos exist across governments, across departments and across business areas, and each type of silo requires different types of interventions.

Along with this, governments are particularly sensitive to the risk of any administration failure that may reflect badly on elected officials. This in turn can often lead to a risk-averse culture. Resource management, digital skill gaps, and funding are also critical.

“Government CIOs who drive a technology-led transformation are destined for lacklustre progress at best, and failure at worst.”

Government leaders should start tackling the challenges associated with siloed strategies and decision-making even before they start to develop a digital government program. They must be creative, opportunistic, and pragmatic when it comes to approaching digital transformation strategy.

Here is a more in-depth look at Gartner’s other top challenges and what governments can do to tackle them:

  • Challenge 1: Risk-Averse Culture — Governments are particularly sensitive to risk. Executives are fearful of failure, they don’t want it to reflect badly on their performance, and it results in a general aversion to taking risks at all. Frontline, service-delivery-focused workforces can be change-averse in this way also, as they do not perceive any benefit in re-inventing practices if they’re proven to work. So, it is not surprising that business culture blocking change is the second most common challenge (42%) when adopting digital solutions. Government CIOs who drive a technology-led transformation are destined for lacklustre progress at best, and failure at worst. Transformation programs must be business-outcome-led and incorporate organisation change as a core element of their program.
  • Challenge 2: Funding — At 37%, insufficient funding/budgets is the third most common challenge for CIOs. Funding challenges are often a symptom of one or more issues, including siloed strategies and decision-making. Another common cause of funding challenges is where technology expenditure is considered an operating expense rather than a strategic, business-outcome-driven investment. Stimulus spending, currently available in many parts of the world, has opened short-term opportunities for accelerated investment in digital, but advocating for a share of this funding requires CIOs to be able to make those clear connections between the digital investment and the business outcomes they deliver.
  • Challenge 3: Digital Skills Gap — 37% of respondents report an insufficient depth or breadth of digital skills across their organisation as one of their top challenges. Core specialist competency in areas such as enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, cloud, analytics and digital experience design are vital to successful digital transformation programs. However, equally important is extending the change-ready culture through the development of digital dexterity across the entire organisation.
  • Challenge 4: Resourcing — 28% reporting insufficient availability of IT or business resources. A lack of timely access to expert resources is often a direct symptom of disconnected priorities, siloed decision-making, cultural challenges, and a lack of digital dexterity at the executive level. Actively addressing those challenges will have a knock-on impact on resourcing challenges. Similarly, tackling the digital skills gap across the organisation will indirectly assist in addressing IT resource challenges. However, given the post-pandemic acceleration in digital investments across all industries, governments can expect skills and resourcing challenges to continue.

The standout examples

Across the world, government organisations from local to national are inching towards a solidifying digital transformation journey. The top finalists in Gartner’s Eye on Innovation awards for Government in 2021 has highlighted some notable examples.

  • Tax and debt obligations project, Tracasa Instrumental, Navarre, Spain
  • Close the Tax Gap, Israeli Tax Authority, Israel
  • Scaling Total Experience in Government, Department of Digital Ajman, Ajman, UAE

Over the last 2 years, amid a global pandemic, many governments have entered new phases of their digital journeys. One of these was Sweden.

The COVID-19 crisis required governments to provide financial assistance for citizens who lost income due to illness or job loss. The Swedish social security agency’s agile and digital-first approach spotlights an example of how CIOs can optimise and automate public services in extreme circumstances.

Meanwhile, The Danish Safety Technology Authority’s use of computer vision to scale and automate the monitoring of e-commerce in Denmark is also a highlight. Government CIOs can use this study to inspire comparable process automation within their organisations.

In Germany, work is continuing to provide parents of newborn children access to services and subsidies in a simple, seamless and less bureaucratic way. Across the border, the French government has added a new capability to detect companies at risk of bankruptcy, and to assist those companies proactively, so that the negative impacts won’t be felt as harshly.

Gartner’s predictions and advice

Governments need to focus on scaling digital initiatives through hyper-automation, decision intelligence, and composable technologies and principles.

By 2023, at least 85% of governments without a “total experience” (TX) strategy will fail to successfully transform government services. Governments that continue to focus on citizen and employee experience initiatives separately will miss out on essential synergies to effectively transform their services.

Governments must move from a siloed approach to a cohesive strategy – encompassing the experience angle across multiple platforms, channels, and technologies for the most intuitive user experience.

This can drive digital adoption, improve outcomes and mitigate the effects of underwhelming service experience which, if it’s left unchecked, will lead to a failure of a government’s digital transformation. Government CIOs need to prioritise investments in capabilities that can be leveraged by both employees and citizens. For example, using “voice of the citizen” and “voice of the employee” input to identify common pain points. If this is done, it can help refine the experiences for both through one initiative. CIOs need to focus on supporting effortless experience across multiple touchpoints by linking datasets, as digital solutions can help employees be more citizen-centric and improve overall governance.

Increased reliance on hyperautomation

Investments in emerging technologies have the potential to offer a huge opportunity for a government’s operational transformation, and to widen the vast arena of opportunities to improve public services. Gartner predicts that 75% of governments will have at least three enterprise-wide hyper automation initiatives launched or underway by 2024.

The benefits include improved business agility and improved employee productivity gained over the last two years from remote access and automation of tasks will advance this strategy.

Decision intelligence will gain more importance in government organisations

Continuing to deploy automation, pressure on remote decision-making, dealing with backlogs of work, and the need for speed and accuracy – all these issues require decision support at the first point of interaction.

Gartner predicts that by 2024, at least 60% of government artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics investments will directly impact real-time operational decisions and outcomes. Recovery of economies and services from the backlog of the past two years requires accelerating decisions and improving first-time accuracy: this requires the flexibility and speed of operational analytics.

Accurate and highly contextualised decisions are gaining more importance as global economies are challenged with unprecedented uncertainty. Building data fabric within government organisations will gain vital importance. As the need for contactless governance increases, governments will advance capabilities in natural language processing and machine learning, embedding these solutions into mainstream products, and making them available at scale across the organisation.

You can read more in these reports:

“Predicts 2022: Governments Scaling Gains From Disruption”

Top Technology Trends in Government for 2022

Top Business Trends in Government for 2022

US President Joe Biden signed an executive order in December 2021, with the aim of revitalising the way America provides public services to its citizens. “Our government must recommit to being of the people, by the people and for the people,” he said in a statement at the time.

Political leadership across the world has recognised the intrinsic importance of digitalisation as central to the future of each nation. In the United States, President Joe Biden recently issued an executive order regarding federal customer experience and service delivery to rebuild trust in government.

Consequently, 2022 will see historic government investments to enhance sustainability and resiliency. Key themes of investments already announced include:

  • Sustainability and green energy
  • Transportation and mobility
  • Competitive economy
  •  Digitalisation and innovation
  • Digital infrastructure

Public-sector leaders want to create future-ready organisations that can deliver and scale digital transformation initiatives in the face of uncertainty, shifting mission priorities and rapidly evolving challenges.

Government leaders can use the tech trends to guide their digital investments and anticipate potential disruption, while dealing with sector-specific constraints like low digital maturity, unmet citizen expectations, insufficient resources and difficulties scaling innovation.

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© Univmedia Ltd

t/a Universal Media
360 North Circular Road, Phibsborough, Dublin 7
talk@unimedia.ie