Gartner: “This Hype Cycle helps government agencies eager to embrace digital transformation by highlighting critical technologies that can be adopted quickly.
What You Need to Know
Austerity continues to impact governments, and the requirement to transform is substantial. Years of cuts have left IT departments struggling to operate bimodally, focused on maintaining operations, but not delivering innovation. Effective and efficient mission delivery necessitates more technology, not less, so senior organizational leaders look outside the IT department to source innovation and additional capacity. Digital government demands improvements in the value chain, using end-to-end frictionless transactions, as the outcome of technical and process improvement. CIOs’ focus must move from infrastructure and its costs toward quickly delivering true mission outcome improvements.
This Hype Cycle highlights technologies that government CIOs should be implementing or planning for to ensure the organization obtains the necessary, impactful capabilities to deliver the digital government agenda quickly. To maintain their own relevance, government CIOs must recognize their organizations’ need for innovation and be mindful of the top trends and technologies disrupting their organizations.
The Hype Cycle
This Hype Cycle addresses all geographies and tiers of government tackling the opportunities presented by digital disruptions. The technologies herein support digital government and the global trends identified in“The Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for Government in 2016.” These technologies align to one or more of the trends and offer a mix of benefits, from increased effectiveness and efficiency, to improved security and enhanced customer interaction. Our intention is to draw attention to those technologies that map directly to these trends, and their inclusion is explained in the section “Off the Hype Cycle.”
Slower economic growth, higher debt, rising citizen expectations and an aging population demand innovative delivery of citizen-facing services, so the ROI to support investment in these technologies must be measured in more-effective outcomes. Agencies crave new solutions and capabilities to help ease the pressure on them, and they think that, if not delivered by their incumbent IT provider, they will increasingly source directly.
The technologies selected provide practical and pragmatic choices for those CIOs who need to deliver strategic solutions to enhance organizational capabilities. Use Cloud Office and Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS) to deliver a better digital workplace experience, or make better use of open data by using data quality tools, API marketplaces, and geospatial and location intelligence tools. We also offer a glimpse of the future to provide a better understanding of how smart machines, such as Smart Robots or Cognitive Expert Advisors, will impact your agency. In either case, using the technologies highlighted here and using Strategic Technology Maps to assess what priority and when you might be able to move will assist the business in knowing when functionality will become available. This knowledge may inspire the use of commercially available capabilities and forgo the desire for customers to self-source solutions.
Source: Gartner (July 2016)
The Priority Matrix
The Priority Matrix shows those technologies and the time frame by which they are expected to mature and deliver benefits. Transformational and high benefits accrue immediately and run forward, delivering across the next decade. It is no surprise seeing that immediate benefits accrue to tactical investment technologies, such as Social Media Engagement Applications. They allow government agencies to go beyond monitoring citizen satisfaction by giving them a level of analysis and allowing them to engage in an informed two-way debate. Thus, multichannel citizen engagement can become a measured reality, taking government out to where the citizens communicate. This is supported by customer engagement hubs that allow personalized, contextual engagement with customers across all interaction channels, regardless of medium.
Smart Machines and the Internet of Things (IoT) are also featured this year, with real examples of technologies to help smart cities progress, with the inclusion of smart transportation solutions and an IOT platform that can help government agencies deal with the plethora of data sources that will undoubtedly emerge. It must be noted, these technologies operate as digital platforms, per se. “Implementing once, serving many” must become a mantra for digital government if it is to succeed at being both effective and efficient.
Figure 2. Priority Matrix for Digital Government, 2016
Source: Gartner (July 2016)…(More).”