GovTech Europe speaks with Cristina Caballe, Executive Director, Global Public Sector at IBM, and a member of IBM Industry Academy.
Cristina reveals what IBM has been doing in the world of GovTech and shares her thoughts on recent developments in the sector, from the effects of the pandemic to cybersecurity and the tech solutions to keep an eye on over the next few years.
GovTech Europe: Your organisation has been working in the GovTech sector for some time. What are the most pressing tech challenges that governments face right now? Any notable examples?
Cristina Caballe: Unsurprisingly, the most pressing tech challenges that governments face right now stem from the COVID-19 pandemic, and geopolitical shifts, making the need for increased cybersecurity more important than ever.
When the pandemic started two years ago, government IT infrastructure across Europe was often unprepared to handle the sudden and intense strain of a largely remote workforce and evolving citizen service needs. Like other highly regulated industries, governments have deep investments in legacy technologies – many of which are more expensive to maintain, more exposed to cybersecurity risks, and less effective in accomplishing their intended purpose. As a result, multiple agencies faced growing, persistent cyberattacks. For instance, the Ministry of Labour and Social Economy in Spain suffered several ransomware cyberattacks for weeks. In the US, the SolarWinds attack directly affected at least nine federal agencies.
And while COVID was an historic pivot point for governments’ digital transformation – from telehealth to telework, rarely in modern history have we seen so many large-scale experiments in governments rolled out so quickly and at such a massive scale – at the start of 2022 many of the deep-seated legacy issues remain. Government technology leaders now have an opportunity to address challenges more deliberately and purposefully, taking advantage of the current momentum and lessons learned from the past year two years.
GE: How did the pandemic shaped your development of tech for governments? Any examples of projects that have ramped up speed?
CC: During the pandemic specifically, four critical themes emerged. Firstly, many governments were caught off guard, but quickly shifted to rapid innovation and modernisation. Secondly, citizen trust became a critical issue as governments sought to provide services and keep the economy going – while balancing protection, personal liberty and equity. Thirdly, security was not appropriately prioritised during emergency response – opening gaps in protection. And lastly, as the world and governments adapt, agency employees must learn new ways of working.
The solutions, therefore, needed to focus on rapid innovation and agility; increasing trust and transparency; security; and talent and transformation.
Concretely, during the pandemic, IBM has addressed these critical themes by being a key partner to governments with supercomputers that helped a government consortium accelerate the race for COVID treatments; supporting numerous remote-education and contact-tracing efforts; and launching some of the first vaccine passports with governments in the U.S. and Europe. Our pool of deep government industry talent is dedicated to helping government agencies modernise and use trustworthy AI to put critical data and information into the right hands to address the right challenges.
Other, already existing, projects ramped up significantly due to the pandemic. In Italy, for example, IBM Security and IBM Partners were working for many years with the main Italian social security and welfare institute (INPS) to improve cybersecurity protection — improving step by step their protection from cyber threats in a 360-degree journey. The Covid pandemic accelerated the project to support the new smart working approach adopted by the INPS in a very short time to continue to support millions of citizens in a very dramatic period.
To emerge stronger & more resilient from the pandemic, government leaders should be thinking around four key architectural decision points: predicting outcomes, automating at scale, securing everything, and modernising with ease.
COVID taught us that governments can move fast. And the right technologies can accelerate that much-needed change.
GE: Are there any innovative tech solutions currently being developed/coming around the corner that you’re focusing on? What doors will these open for government technologies?
CC: Every industry, including government, is facing digital disruption. By our analysis, seventy-five percent of government leaders say traditional business models aren’t sustainable in the current environment.
The public expects the agility and efficiency found in the private sector, and governments must appeal to new workers with the skills to meet these requirements to attract investment and grow economies. Security alone demands significant increases in investment and oversight. For many governments, it may take time to re-examine their role in society and re-imagine how to achieve sustained success. Perhaps decades. But change is inevitable.
By leveraging automation to complete repetitive tasks with greater consistency and speed, many back-office processes can be re-imagined. As technologies mature, every government process will be re-examined and re-architected.
Supported by artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive computing, flesh-and-blood experts will find more time to focus on activities where human judgment and experience has greater impact. For example, AI and cognitive computing-enabled tools can make filing taxes faster and easier and deliver more precise results.
Network technologies, including blockchain, that enhance the security of online records, will redefine many core government functions such as global trade, customs, and visa processing, rendering them more trustworthy and efficient. Once a record is added to the blockchain, it’s permanent and difficult to tamper with. The Internet of Things (IoT) that infuses devices with the ability to communicate status information to other systems that then evaluate and act on it, will increasingly help run integrated cities.
GE: What other solutions matter when trying to meet the challenges that you have described? Any notable examples?
CC: IBM approaches challenges with an eye on collaboration and – just like its technology – remains open to the best solution.
Our technologies and services essential for government IT modernisation include:
- IT modernisation and hybrid/multi-cloud: aligns with governments’ anti- ‘vendor lock-in’ IT modernisation mindset and needs. It provides government agencies with the flexibility to straddle on-premises, mainframe, private, public and edge environments. Such flexibility allows IT modernisation decisions to be made over time, while providing the performance needed to keep mission-critical operations functioning. IBM’s open, secure, hybrid/multi-cloud approach – strengthened by the 2018 acquisition of Red Hat – is cloud and vendor-agnostic, encouraging application sharing and bringing development and operations together through automation of tasks, data interoperability and management, all while improving enterprise security with validation and escalation of threats. Our work with the Department for Work and Pensions in the UK, is an example of this.
- Automation: digital automation reduces the need for human intervention to run processes and drive efficiencies. This can speed up response times for government claims or inquiries because government workers are free to focus on more meaningful tasks. For example, rather than requiring employees to manually enter VA claims, automation allows employees to close those claims more quickly.
- Data fabric and AI: The global crisis highlighted that many governments could not provide the right and relevant information to understand the impact of disruption and empower citizens to make the right decisions. Data fabric is an integral element of a government agency’s IT modernisation strategy, as it enables the integration and centralised data quality management across cloud, on-premises, mainframe and edge devices. It uses trusted AI built on transparency, explainability, robustness, fairness, and privacy, with the flexibility to permission certain sets of data. This is key for meeting the varying levels of clearance required for certain data sets.
- Cybersecurity: IBM collaborates with government agencies to implement new approaches to cybersecurity that help protect data across hybrid, multi-cloud environments either on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge. In the US, we launched the IBM Center for Government Cybersecurity last year: a collaborative environment focused on helping US federal agencies address and understand current and future cybersecurity threats and trends. These include zero-trust network security and AI to help combat security threats, as well as identity protection and encryption.
- IBM Consulting: combines industry expertise, vendor and cloud-agnostic capabilities, industry assets, proprietary assessment tools and accelerators – like IBM Garage – to help government agencies accelerate their digital transformation.
- Ecosystem: IT modernisation is a government-wide, systems challenge that cannot be addressed by one vendor, product or service and requires a different approach to partnership.
