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Ten major technology trends within governments are expected to pave a way forward through coronavirus pandemic around the world, holding the potential to accelerate digital innovation.
This is according to analyst firm Gartner, which claims that the trends are directly linked to public administration and policy issues that government leaders need to address.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred the acceleration of digital innovation across the government sector around the world, presenting government leaders with new opportunities to use data and technologies to build trust, agility and resilience in public institutions,” said Rick Howard, research vice president at Gartner.
“While pandemic-related challenges will continue for some time, technology trends have emerged that address critical challenges in areas such as security, cost containment and citizen experience.”
Citizen digital identity
Citizen digital identity — the ability to prove an individual’s identity through government digital channels that are available to citizens — is being viewed as critical for inclusion and access to government services, according to Gartner, with the topic being high on political agendas.
The critical nature of digital identities is expected to rocket in popularity, with Gartner predicting by 2024, a “true global, portable, decentralised identity standard” will be available in order to address business, personal, social and societal and identity-invisible use cases.
Composable government enterprise
According to the firm, composable government enterprises enable the reusing of capabilities to be extended, as well as the continuous adaption to changing regulatory, legislative and public expectations.
“CIOs are embracing composable government to overcome existing, siloed approaches to managing services, systems and data that limit the ability of governments to adapt to the rapidly evolving needs of the emerging digital society," Gartner claimed.
The trend is expected to see widespread adoption, with the firm predicting that 50 per cent of technology companies that provide products and services to the government will offer packaged business capabilities to support composable applications by 2023.
Accelerated legacy modernisation
Accelerated legacy modernisation is another trend to consider, particularly with governments being faced with decades-old legacy infrastructure and core systems.
While Gartner notes that this is not exactly a new issue, the pandemic has highlighted the need to modernise systems. As such, it predicted that by 2025, over 50 per cent of government agencies will have modernised critical core legacy applications.
Adaptive security
According to the firm, treating security with an adaptive approach is another government tech trend to be aware of, which treats risk, trust and security as a continuous and adaptive process to anticipate and mitigate constantly evolving cyber threats through prediction, prevention, detection and response.
This is opposed to the traditional idea of perimeter and assuming there is no boundary for safe and unsafe, which Gartner claims is a “necessary conceptual shift” with the move to cloud services.
Most government CIOs are expected to be directly responsible for security outside of IT by 2025, at 75 per cent, according to the firm, and will also cover operational and mission-critical technology environments.
Anything as a service (XaaS)
Viewed by Gartner as a cloud-only sourcing strategy that brings the full range of business and IT services on a subscription basis, XaaS is considered by the firm to be an alternative to legacy infrastructure modernisation.
It’s also expected to become very popular, with Gartner forecasting that 95 per cent of new IT investments made by government agencies will be in the form of an as-a-service solution by 2025.
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