Gartner highlights strategic technologies for government in 2016

According to the recent study by Gartner, government CIOs remain under pressure to further optimise IT and business costs while leading digital innovation in the public sector.

The study underlined that government CIOs face organisational and cultural challenges that are barriers to harnessing the synergistic potential of social, mobile, data analytics, cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT) to drive transformational change.

Rick Howard, research vice president, Gartner, said legacy silos of systems, data and processes reinforce “business as usual” practices and behaviours that limit government participation in broader partner ecosystems capable of supporting fully digital end-to-end citizen services.

“In the digital service economy, government must make strategic investments in IT or risk perpetuating suboptimal business and service models that are financially unsustainable in the long term,” said Howard. “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 organisations.”

Spending by national, federal and local governments worldwide on technology products and services is forecast to grow slightly by 0.3 percent to $430.1 billion in 2016, growing to $476.1 billion by 2020. This is a turnaround after a 5.2 percent decrease in 2015.

To enable government transformation initiatives, Gartner has identified the top 10 strategic technologies in 2016 and provides recommendations to CIOs and IT leaders regarding adoption and benefits. The list includes adoption of a digital workplace, multichannel citizen engagement, open data, citizen e-ID, analytics, smart machines and IoT. Digital government platforms, software-defined architecture and risk-based security will also see wider utilisation.

“Many of these technology trends change business models in ways that need to be reflected in more modern policies, especially those related to privacy or regulation,” said Howard. “CIOs will need to be front and center in providing advice to policymaking bodies and working with industry experts who can consult on options and impacts.”