According to Deloitte’s GovTech Trends 2023 report, federal agencies are still largely unwilling to embrace disruptive and emerging technologies to support digital transformations.. The Professional Services Network’s annual report highlights the technology trends most likely to cause disruption over the next 18-24 months and assesses government readiness to embrace them.
Based on several trends, Deloitte rated the federal government at the lower end of its readiness scale, although agencies performed well on a few key technologies. This is partly due to the unique challenges that government organizations face.
“A large portion of government IT budgets is dedicated to operations and maintenance,” says Scott Buchholz, CTO of Deloitte’s Government and Public Services practice. “As a result, it is often difficult to find the funds needed to make improvements that actually save costs and improve future budgets. In general, similarly sized commercial IT organizations spend significantly less on operations and maintenance.”
What technology trends are on the horizon and how can agencies prepare for them? The report describes where improvements are needed and how to make them.
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Agencies are lagging behind on the Deep Internet
Deloitte defined “immersive virtual experiences” as a technology trend that refers to the shift towards multiple experiences in virtual reality (VR), mixed reality and augmented reality, creating ways for people to connect with each other in digital worlds. Deloitte has given the government a score of 1 on readiness to adopt such technologies. (The scoring scale is from 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest score.)
Agencies may not yet be able to adopt these technologies, but there are opportunities to support constituents and employees. The report provides examples: Virtual office visits could make it easier for voters to meet with state employees, which could be helpful for people with disabilities or time and transportation constraints. VR could also provide in-depth training to help civil servants react safely and effectively to high-pressure real-world situations.
RESEARCH: How government initiatives drive digital transformation.
Agencies must prepare for decentralization and modernization
In terms of decentralized architecture, Deloitte rated government readiness at 2. Blockchain-powered decentralized ecosystems are key to building digital trust, which is a measure of a user’s trust in an organization to create secure digital environments.
Deloitte notes that there is an opportunity for agencies to use blockchain-powered solutions to enable, transform and automate processes with other organizations as blockchain adoption increases. As regulators, agencies can provide policy and regulatory clarity to support national innovation.
Deloitte also awarded the agencies a 2 in mainframe modernization. This refers to updating existing legacy IT systems (such as mainframes) to fit today’s technology landscape, as opposed to completely replacing core systems. Organizations are using mainframes to drive digital transformation to leverage the trusted functionality of legacy systems and the capabilities of emerging technologies.
Deloitte urges agencies to consider using technologies and techniques that enable incremental modernization and incremental service improvements to embrace emerging technologies while mitigating the risk of migration.
The challenge in implementing such emerging technologies is finding the right balance between taking advantage of new opportunities and maintaining security.
“In our increasingly digital world, a failure of a government system can have catastrophic consequences. On the other hand, due to the constraints of government budgets and constant changes in the workforce, the introduction of advanced automation techniques is increasingly necessary,” says Buchholz. “Leaders must balance modernization needs, budget constraints, knowledge loss, ongoing cybersecurity threats, and the ever-present risk of technological disruption.”
MORE ABOUT: How federal agencies can leverage the cloud to update applications.
Agencies are embracing some key trends
The public sector performed better on a few technology trends that Deloitte found to be very important. The report’s relevance scale takes into account how influential it would be if the government adopted a trend. (The scoring scale is from 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest score.)
Managing multi-cloud environments received a relevance score of 4. Based on this trend, agencies received a readiness score of 3. Deloitte notes that agencies should automate complexity management using out-of-the-box tools to manage details across all cloud providers.
Given the trend of transforming the technology workforce for greater flexibility, the public sector received the highest score of 5 on the relevance scale and a readiness score of 3.
According to the report, hiring for current needs is not a good long-term strategy. Instead, companies should adopt the mindset that technology talent can be curated, created and nurtured, with flexibility as the most important capability. Deloitte notes that in addition to recruiting top talent, agencies should also create pipelines for “non-traditional talent” for the future.
