Top Technology Trends in Government for 2024

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Top Technology Trends in Government for 2024: Complimentary Gartner® Report

Aimed at CIOs, digital leaders and decision makers in Government organizations, this new Gartner research identifies the top technology trends emerging in 2024, provides strategic planning assumptions, analysis and recommendations on action to take now.

Overview

Gartner research finds that:

• “Demand by citizens for modern, accessible and resilient services is accelerating. Government CIOs have to find new ways to meet these demands with sustainable and scalable technology.”
• “Government has a central role in overseeing and enabling responsible, secure and equitable economic and societal gains from digitization while concurrently adapting its own business and operating models.”
• “Divergent pressure on policymakers forces CIOs to increasingly demonstrate value and agility while continuously improving business capabilities in their organizations.”

The research groups top trends into three priority areas:

1. Realize Risk
2. Reimagine Value
3. Evolve Operations

Highlights from these areas are summarized in this article. The full report can be accessed for a limited time using the link above.

Realize Risk

Gartner research finds that “As public policies are catching up to certain emerging technologies, CIOs must move quickly to assure citizen trust in the services they consume and that those services are addressing citizens’ most pressing needs. Managing public trust in newly deployed digital capabilities, as well as assuring the availability of government services is more critical than ever before. Citizens are increasingly expecting the government to exceed their expectations for privacy, security and ethical use of data.”

The top trend identified by Gartner research within the theme of ‘Realize Risk’, is ‘Adaptive Security’.

Adaptive Security

Gartner research describes the adaptive security model as “one in which cybersecurity tools, techniques and talent merge and continually adjust to the changing threat landscape. Cybersecurity is evolving to focus more on technical risk mitigation and less on compliance. An adaptive security architecture features components for identification, protection, detection, response and recovery. It forgoes traditional notions of perimeter and assumes there is no boundary between what is considered safe and unsafe.”

One of the reasons that adaptive security is included as trending is that “Artificial intelligence is creating new cybersecurity adaptations and requirements. This can be seen in examples such as the recently enacted U.S. Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence and in the European NIS2 cybersecurity regulations. The cyber domain is expanding by virtue of digital convergence of other domains such as supply chain and cyber-physical systems (CPS). Government agencies are among the top targets for attack and face constant threats while struggling with rapid advances in tools and updated compliance frameworks that cumulatively pressure them to regularly evaluate — and adapt — their cybersecurity capabilities.”

Recommended actions include:

• “Overcome any lingering resistance to the adoption of adaptive security by linking its value to broader objectives, such as digital innovation, transformation, national security and organizational resilience.”
• “Adopt an integrated, risk-based security approach by collaborating with leaders for physical, personnel and supply chain security. In addition, collaborate with mission units for CPS, whether created by OT/IT convergence, Internet of Things (IoT), industrial IoT or “smart” programs.”
• “Focus policy and practices on essential activities by emphasizing tools, techniques, response capabilities and talent. Where allowable and practicable, deprioritize document-based compliance activities.”
• “Address the essential human element and develop a cybersecurity culture. Grow expertise from within through in-depth training programs and broad employee support through engaging awareness education.”

Reimagine Value

“More so than ever before, CIOs must embrace methodologies that can produce different business outcomes with little to no new technology investment, such as agile practices. Eliminating technology waste and harvesting maximum value out of existing ecosystems is critical for enduring the financial storm while simultaneously improving the citizen experience, incorporating digital strategies and leveraging the power of data.”

Included within the ‘Reimagine Value’ theme, is the top technology trend of ‘AI for Decision Intelligence’.

AI for Decision Intelligence

Gartner research describes AI for decision intelligence as “the measured, systematic use of AI as a component of improving government mission achievement faster, more accurately and with sustainable resource use. It is a practical discipline that improves decision making by explicitly understanding how decisions are made and how their outcomes are evaluated and improved by feedback. It applies to all major levels of decision types: one-off strategic decisions, managerial decisions, and high-volume operational decisions. Machine learning, predictive and prescriptive analytics, and generative AI will mature over the next two years and combine into a suite of tools that will support improved government service delivery. These tools will need to be subject to careful governance as the attention to the power of AI is driving significant levels of controlling regulation.”

Strategic planning assumption: “By 2026, more than 70% of government agencies will use AI to enhance human administrative decision making and will measure the productivity increases achieved that way.”

This trend is identified as having several implications:

• “Chief AI officer: Many government organizations will need to designate a chief AI officer or equivalent, and build up an organization to support both delivery and continuous assurance.”
• “Maturity: Governance of AI use requires high levels of maturity. This implies a systematic approach to decision augmentation and automation to reduce the risk of unintended consequences. These include inadvertent bias, missing cases requiring escalation, potential damage through inaccurate guidance and inadvertent exposure of sensitive information.”
• “Consistent evaluation process: Organizations, particularly ones under budgetary or resource stress, will require a consistent evaluation process. This will distinguish internal and vendor proposals that are realistic, feasible and within acceptable bounds of risk from those that may seem attractive but in fact will not deliver.”
• “Consolidated governance: Existing initiatives around AI such as machine learning, analytics and prediction should be brought under the same governance to ensure the right AI capabilities are applied to the right problems.”
• “Citizen interactions: Design patterns for interactions with citizens will need to be carefully examined to ensure that the information provided is accurate, consistent across scale and easily understood.”

Actions for CIOs:

• “Drive a policy around how to govern the safe exploration and use of new tools, including generative AI, throughout the organization.”
• “Develop a future-state vision of the business value and public benefit for the use of AI by building a strategy that incorporates AI policies with a focus on desired policy outcomes.”
• “Stage delivery from the initial tranche of benefits (likely to be through acceleration of internal administrative and technical tasks) through to scaled usage across the organization’s societal mission.”
• “Establish a continuous assurance approach — not only governance of initial implementation, but assurance of continued adherence to policies and guardrails as systems and expectations evolve after implementation.”
• “Establish a method to evaluate opportunities that will surface both benefits and challenges across technical, operational and external viewpoints. This should be matched with a benefits evaluation system, which will ensure that implemented systems deliver long-term value.”

Evolve Operations

“Changes in the workforce profile, driven by hybrid return-to-office policies and artificially augmented workforce opportunities, demand that CIOs establish a deliberate focus on quickly reimagining the future workforce now, expanding investments in platform capabilities and exhausting new services from existing data ecosystems.”

Included within the ‘Evolve Operations’ theme is the top trend of ‘Programmatic Data Management’.

Programmatic Data Management

Gartner research summarizes this top trend: “Programmatic data management in government is the systematic and scalable approach to enable enterprise-wide use of data assets. Data excellence requires a systematic and scalable approach to enable data reuse, integrity, resilience and value through incentives and stewardship, standards and platforms, governance, and sustainable innovation pipelines that produce actions.”

Programmatic Data Management is trending in 2024 for governments because:

• “Data remains the basis of decision making, and the growing proliferation of AI reemphasizes the need for both data management and integrity in data structures.”
• “Government leaders are demanding increased use of data for decision making and planning. CIOs are responding by guiding their organizations to establish programmatic data management centered on data excellence.”
• “Expanded emphasis on the importance of data demands attention, spanning from discussions about citizens owning their own data to implications from privacy legislation, rules and analytics.”
• “The proliferation of chief data officers in government is creating a dedicated and deliberate focus on data excellence. This includes the discipline of data, data management and data policies, resulting in an increased ability to respond to political pressures to share data beyond organizational boundaries.”
• “Significantly more innovation and service delivery value can be driven from data where there is (near) real-time access and sufficient consents to allow the data to be used in live operations”

The implications of an increasingly programmatic approach to data management include:

• “Leadership: Data excellence requires compromise, strong sponsorship and political leadership proactively working with stakeholders, accepting risks in return for benefits and developing responsibility for delivering value from data.”
• “Governance: Government must put in place the governance required to address the ethical challenges that may differ from one government organization to the next based on the data they maintain.”
• “Culture change: The prominent culture of compartmentalization for security and privacy reasons needs to be shifted to using data to serve citizens and accelerate data excellence.”
• “Enterprise discipline: Collaborative communities of practice develop or exploit central resources like programs to build enterprise discipline that is intolerant of data mediocrity.”

Actions for Government CIOs to address this opportunity:

• “Enhance the quality and efficiency of data at scale by improving the rules and structures that govern it such that they are consistent, easy to follow and clearly based on a transparent balance of benefit and risk.”
• “Support an enterprise effort to continuously increase maturity and capabilities based on the data value pyramid.”
• “Enable increased data maturity and capabilities across the organization by ensuring that relevant toolsets and skills are available to support both traditional and nontraditional specialists in all departments.”
• “Sustain funding and support of initiatives through changes in leadership or administration with a constant emphasis on discovering new value from existing or accessible data.”

Gartner, Top Technology Trends in Government for 2024, By Todd Kimbriel, Ben Kaner, Albert Gauthier, Apeksha Kaushik, Bill Finnerty, Arthur Mickoleit, Robert Stoneman, Michael Brown, Michael McFerron, Irma Fabular, 20 March 2024.

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