With the pace of change and the increased use of cloud services, the role of public sector technology leaders continues to shift from running technology towards helping government improve mission outcomes, enabled by new technologies. Technology leaders need to move away from being "order takers" to "strategic contributors" in helping achieve better outcomes by identifying opportunities to leverage data more effectively and not just automate, but also by eliminating processes. This requires better awareness and proactive engagement in identifying mission-critical challenges and opportunities at the strategic level through stronger relationships at the C-level.

Initiative: What Technology Trends Enable Government CIOs to Meet Stakeholder Needs?

An IT strategy exists primarily to enable the achievement of mission-critical goals and outcomes. Therefore, to be effective, government leaders must collectively define and agree on the key goals and outcomes they intend to accomplish, and through actions beyond a written strategy, demonstrate the importance of the goals and outcomes through their commitment of time and resources in making them a priority and resolving conflicts across the organization. Where necessary, this includes explicitly stating what the priorities are versus those things that are not and providing the necessary resources for IT to enable those priorities.  

IT modernization is a strategy to reduce the risks of technical debt by migrating from legacy systems to new applications or platforms and consolidating workflows in favor of more automated, innovative services. The benefits of business process optimization — step-change improvements to operating processes and service models — are among the efficiency and effectiveness metrics needed to support a business case for IT modernization. Both IT modernization and business process optimization are aligned to the same goal, which is to make an enduring impact on how government organizations achieve their mission.

While often relatively slowly, change does happen in government usually as a reaction to crisis or change of political leaders. Both can impact the IT strategy, no matter how relevant it is at the time of adoption. However, IT strategies can become more future proof through better anticipation of long-term strategic direction of the organization by focusing on what the best possible outcomes for any given government program are and the technology best positioned to achieve those outcomes. Evaluating the impact of broader societal trends and emerging innovations can ensure strategic alignment of long-term organizational business needs with a changing technology landscape. In politics, intended outcomes may shift with the political winds, but by adopting more flexible and adaptable technologies, even political changes of direction can benefit from what is already being deployed.

Digital government services refer to both the use of digital channels to deliver traditional government services and the transformation of government services by leveraging digital data. The latter can lead to new citizen experience, new services, as well as the elimination of traditional touch points and services. The term “digital services” refers to both actual services, where a citizen or an enterprise are recipients of an actual service — such as social benefits or grants, and to compliance or enforcement interactions — such as tax collection or case investigation. Given the pervasive use of digital technologies in all aspects of government service design and operation, the term digital is expected to progressively disappear as a distinctive aspect of government service and technology strategies. 

Initiative: Why Government Leaders Choose Gartner