“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.”

Gartner’s list of top 10 strategic technology trends is directly linked to public administration and policy issues that government leaders must address. Gartner suggests that government CIOs can use its list to identify technology trends that best address their post-pandemic recovery priorities and establish the rationale, timing and priority of technology investments.

Amongst other technology trends relating directly to government administrative issues, at least half of the issues raised by Gartner are either entirely security focused or partially related to or include security industry techniques - some of which also require a new and innovative approach to addressing the potential risks.

Adaptive security

An adaptive security approach treats risk, trust and security as a continuous and adaptive process that anticipates and mitigates constantly evolving cyber threats. This approach features components for prediction, prevention, detection and response. It forgoes traditional notions of perimeter, assuming there is no boundary for safe and unsafe, a necessary conceptual shift given the migration to cloud services.

Gartner predicts that 75% of government CIOs will be directly responsible for security outside of IT by 2025, to include operational and mission-critical technology environments.

Anything as a Service (XaaS)

XaaS is a cloud-only sourcing strategy that embraces acquiring the full range of business and IT services on a subscription basis. Pandemic response and the critical need for digital service delivery have exacerbated pressures to modernise legacy applications and infrastructure. XaaS offers an alternative to legacy infrastructure modernisation, provides scalability and reduces time to deliver digital services.

Gartner predicts that 95% of new IT investments made by government agencies will be made as a service solution by 2025.

Citizen digital identity

Digital identity is the ability to prove an individual’s identity via any government digital channel that is available to citizens, which is critical for inclusion and access to government services. Digital identity ecosystems are quickly evolving and leading governments to assume new roles and responsibilities. The topic is high on political agendas, so government CIOs must link digital identity to salient use cases.

Gartner predicts that a true global, portable, decentralised identity standard will emerge in the market by 2024, to address business, personal, social and societal, and identity-invisible use cases.

Multichannel citizen engagement

Citizen direct participation with governments reached new heights in 2020 as communities dealt with the pandemic, wildfires, hurricanes and other events. Multichannel citizen engagement is a seamless, bidirectional engagement with constituents across organizational boundaries, while delivering a personalized experience using the preferred and most effective channels to reach them.

Gartner predicts that over 30% of governments will use engagement metrics to track quantity and quality of citizen participation in policy and budget decisions by 2024.

Operationalised analytics

Operationalized analytics is the strategic and systematic adoption of data-driven technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and advanced analytics, at each stage of government activity to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and consistency of decision making. Decision makers can make better context-based operational decisions in real-time to improve the quality of the citizen experience.

Gartner predicts that by 2024, 60% of government AI and data analytics investments aim to directly impact real-time operational decisions and outcomes.