Contributed | Gartner
Produced | CSDN Cloud Computing
Through 2022, government leaders continue to face evolving challenges posed by the pandemic, including social and economic uncertainty. During the period of 2020-2021, which was just beginning to respond to the pandemic, the global digitalization level increased exponentially in order to meet the needs of citizen services and remote work. The tactical nature of the pandemic response has accelerated the digital trajectory and rightfully elevates digital government to the policy level.
Key Issues Related to Sustainability and Resilience
Political leaders around the world have recognized the central importance of digitalization to the future development of their countries. As such, 2022 will witness historic government investments to enhance sustainability and resilience. Governments have developed stimulus and recovery plans for social and economic recovery and resilience (see Figure 1). The main investment areas include the following.
- Sustainability and Green Energy
- Transportation
- competitive economy
- Digitization and Innovation
- digital infrastructure
Figure 1. Common themes in recovery plans around the world
Recovery and resilience are at the heart of the short-term plans for many political agendas. But the cyclical nature of government leadership often leads to a disconnect in technology investment and can slow the execution of digital transformation. At the same time, digital disruption and its growing impact on the economy and society has placed greater demands on government vision and oversight for responsible technology execution (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. Achieving Agility in Government Agencies
To meet these challenges and keep pace with digital innovation, government CIOs and IT leaders must understand the relationship between digital disruption and political imperatives, and their impact on key digital policy priorities in order to enable trust, resilience and agility sex becomes possible. The following digital policies are the drivers driving key government business trends in 2022 (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. Government business trends in 2022
The importance of digital leadership
Digital leadership is the foundation for an effective response to 2022 trends. It is the responsibility of senior government and elected officials to drive the digital capabilities and policy competitiveness of government departments to optimize, develop and transform the government agencies they lead. Digital government presents an opportunity to optimize existing citizen services and transform the way government value is measured and delivered. Governments need to exercise digital leadership at every level of their organisation and in relevant sectors.
Effective digital leadership is critical for government leaders to recognize the opportunities presented by other business trends and mitigate risks. Conversely, weak digital leadership can exacerbate tensions and prevent governments from fulfilling their duty to maintain civil society.
The link between business trends and strategic technologies
Government CIOs and IT leaders can use our research on government business trends to further understand the links between macro challenges at the political and societal levels and the technological capabilities and investments needed to address them. These trend analyses can help CIOs make informed decisions that improve their business capabilities and help them achieve government agency goals.
Trend: Ethics and Privacy
Morality consists of a series of values and moral principles transmitted by the interactive behavior of people, organizations and things. It is embodied in four aspects: principle, choice, action, and consequence. It involves not only human beings, but also the behavioral standards of rapidly growing machines and technologies. Privacy is the right to protect personally identifiable information and prevent misuse.
In a digital context, ethics encompasses not only the ethics of the use of data and artificial intelligence (AI), but also all the ways in which technology interacts with living things and the natural environment.
Privacy protection is another very important ethical factor in government-citizen relations and a prerequisite for building trust.
Fact Sheet: Digital Equity
Digital equity refers to the ability of individuals and communities to understand and use digital technologies to improve their own conditions. Digital equity is an empowerment that allows citizens to obtain digital resources in an inclusive and trusting manner for basic services such as citizen participation, employment, lifelong learning, healthcare, and finance.
Fact Sheet: Institutional Agility
Institutional agility refers to the ability and willingness of government leaders to perceive and respond to change from a policy and operational service perspective. This trend requires the support of flexible technical architectures and applications.
Stable, prudent government processes are an important pillar of civil society. But government agencies must also respond faster than ever to changes caused by environmental, economic and technological changes. Institutional agility balances stability and speed by enabling government leaders and CIOs to anticipate transformative events and ensure that technology and workforces can quickly adapt to any contingencies.
Effective communication and transparency are key to building trust between governments and citizens. CIOs must assist leading government agencies to achieve civic engagement through a comprehensive approach to communicating with the public that enables coherent and credible interactions across multiple channels.
Fact Sheet: The Evolving Civil Service
Increased mobility of government workers, hybrid working models, and emerging new ways of delivering services to citizens are impacting public service industries and practitioners. Traditional job roles will be redefined and some jobs will be performed by emerging technologies such as drones, cameras, sensors and other robots in conjunction with people in various locations, changing the roles of many civil servants and creating hybrid work models.
Fact Sheet: Digital Sovereignty
Digital sovereignty is the action taken by governments to protect and control state-generated data and maintain their own technological autonomy. The goal of this policy is to protect the data and privacy of citizens, businesses and government agencies against misuse, overexploitation, cyber threats and terrorism. Controls include adopting laws and/or policies to ensure security in the following areas.
- Data residency (storing data within the geographic boundaries of the jurisdiction)
- Data sovereignty (determining legislative jurisdiction to manage data)
- Data access (control of encryption techniques allowed for commercial products)
- Digital Sovereignty (insisting on specific technologies such as open source)