Deloitte's Government Tech Trends Report, Exploring Technologies That Help Government Thrive in a Climate of Disruption

Report examines a decade of technological change, identifying key trends that will reshape government in the next 18-24 months

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Deloitte

Feb 26, 2019, 00:01 ET

WASHINGTON, Feb. 26, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Deloitte released its "Government Tech Trends 2019: Beyond the digital frontier." The report explores how the convergence of new technologies with powerful technological forces is driving disruption across government. New technologies include advanced networking, serverless computing and intelligent interfaces; and technological forces encompass digital experiences, cognitive and cloud.

"Many government organizations are finding that each individual advancement in technology – for example blockchain, digital reality or serverless cloud architecture – is powerful, but that the real power emerges when they combine," said Scott Buchholz, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP and chief technology officer for its government and public services practice. "Finding ways to integrate a constellation of new technologies into a new operational paradigm is the next level challenge that's unfolding in government right now."

Government Tech Trends 2019, based on Deloitte Tech Trends, interprets the trends with a focus on government. The report also includes a score for each trend based on its relevancy to government and government's readiness to adopt.

The eight trends that are giving rise to new operating models, redefining the nature of work, and dramatically changing IT's relationship with the business include:

1) Macro technology forces at work – The nine technology forces at work are: cloud, analytics, digital experience, blockchain, cognitive, digital reality, core modernization, cyber, and the business of information technology. These forces are critical for organizations — their controlled collision can compound the effect of purposeful, transformational change.

Trend in action: A supply chain can be optimized with an integrated combination of technologies – next-gen core financial system upgrades, cloud deployments, AI predictive models, blockchain for tracking and more.

2) AI-fueled organizations - Leading organizations are harnessing AI's full potential for data-driven decision making and generating valuable insights. To become a true "AI-fueled" organization, a department or agency needs to find AI's place in the mission, rethink its talent, focus on human and machine interaction in its environment, and deploy machine learning across core business processes and enterprise operations.

Trend in action: Use AI and machine learning to help curb fraud, waste, and abuse by detecting invalid, improper or mischaracterized payments.

3) NoOps in a serverless world - Cloud providers have doggedly automated traditional infrastructure and security management tasks and are increasing the complexity and value of "as a service" capabilities. As a result, technical resources are interacting less and less with the underlying system infrastructure. Operations talent can shift to increasingly agile teams focusing on higher-order (and higher-value) activities that more directly support mission outcomes.

Trend in action: Pay-as-you-go models offer flexibility and cost-efficiency for seasonal demands like tax filings or health care enrollment. Look at piloting new application using container-based, function-based, or other new cloud computing models.

4) Connectivity of tomorrow - Advanced networking offers a continuum of connectivity that can drive development of new products and services or transform inefficient operating models. From edge computing and mesh networks to 5G, satellite, and ultra-broadband, organizations across sectors and geographies are relooking at advanced connectivity options to design their networks of tomorrow.

Trend in action: Field-deployed personnel will soon have greater bandwidth on their mobile devices than they have at their desks today – rethink processes and systems to take advantage of the connectivity.

5) Intelligent interfaces - Intelligent interfaces combine the latest in human-centered design with leading-edge technologies such as computer vision, conversational voice, auditory analytics, and advanced augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality. Working in concert, these techniques and capabilities can transform the ways we engage with machines, data, and each other.

Trend in action: With AR, skilled technicians can move from one system to another without extra training. Inspectors can use facial and image recognition with speech capture interfaces. Indirect measures of activity time and personnel efficiency permit digitalization and analysis.

6) Beyond Marketing—Experience reimagined - Today's citizens expect highly personalized, contextualized experiences. To deliver them, leading chief marketing officers are looking inward to closer partnerships with their own CIOs and a new generation of marketing tools and techniques powered by data-enabled emerging technologies.

Trend in action: Service programs can use advanced marketing techniques to engage the population, gauge reactions and adjust rollouts.

7) DevSecOps and the cyber imperative - To enhance their approaches to cybersecurity and cyber risk, forward-thinking organizations are embedding security, privacy, policy, and controls into their evolved IT delivery models. DevSecOps fundamentally transforms cyber and risk management from compliance-based activities (typically undertaken late in the development lifecycle) into essential framing mindsets that help shape system design from the ground up.

Trend in action: The National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration are working to standardize, automate, and virtualize processes using close-knit teams that integrate development, security and operations into to reduce human error, speed results and make difficult operations invisible to the user.

8) Beyond the digital frontier: Digital transformation has become a rallying cry for business and technology strategists. Yet all too often, organizations anchor their approach on a specific technology advance. Developing a systematic approach for identifying and harnessing opportunities born of the intersections of technology, science, and business is an essential first step in demystifying digital transformation, and making it concrete, achievable and measurable.

Trend in action: Cashierless stores could serve as models for Department of Defense Exchanges. Government health providers can use health care insurers' AI-enabled verification of eligibility for medical procedures. Organizations are increasingly using AI and other digital techniques to screen recruits.

"These trends are actively shaping strategic and operational transformations today, redefining IT's role within government and forcing leaders to reimagine what it means to govern and serve against the backdrop of a global, digitally driven economy," said Buchholz.

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SOURCE Deloitte