The Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for Government in 2015

Gartner's 2015 top strategic technology trends for government are the prime enablers of new service models for digital government. CIOs and IT leaders can use this research to assess the impact of these technologies on their IT organizations, and to determine the business value for their agencies.

• Government CIOs who explain digital innovation in terms of business priorities – such as citizen experience, operational efficiency and improved outcomes – have the opportunity to increase support for IT investments among their agencies' executive leaders.
• The limitations of e-government service models reflect the constraints of inflexible architectures and traditional IT management practices, which are compelling government CIOs to factor emerging technology trends into their digital government strategic plans.
• Organizational culture, legacy IT systems and business processes, stretched IT budgets, and the lack of critical IT skills are among the inhibitors for government CIOs when evaluating and selecting new technology or sourcing options.

Government CIOs and IT leaders:

• Gain support for digital innovation from public officials and administrators by presenting relevant examples of what the consumer service industry or other digitally savvy government agencies have done with digital, how they have done it, and what the results have been.
• Factor these top 10 technology trends into your IT planning activities. Determine which trends are most applicable to your agency's business strategy, and consider the various ways they can run, innovate or transform your organization.
• Re-evaluate core competencies, and select the technologies or services you will divest or broker over the next three years in order to increase capacity in areas such as contract management, bimodal capability or workforce development.

By 2018, 25% of large organizations will have an explicit strategy to make their corporate computing environments similar to a consumer computing experience. (Digital Workplace)

By 2018, more than 30% of digital government projects will treat any data as open data. (Open Any Data)

By the end of 2017, 20% of IAM purchases will use the IDaaS delivery model – up from less than 10% in 2014. (Citizen e-ID)

By 2018, data discovery and data management evolution will drive most organizations to augment centralized analytic architectures with decentralized approaches. (Edge Analytics)

Through 2018, there will be no dominant IoT ecosystem platform; IT leaders will still need to compose solutions from multiple providers. (Internet of Things)

By 2018, more than 25% of new IT projects in traditional enterprises will be built on Web-scale architectures. (Web-Scale IT)

By 2020, at least 70% of new application development projects will be deployed to private or public cloud infrastructures. (Hybrid Cloud [and IT])

In many parts of the world, the lingering effects of economic uncertainty and austerity measures continue to influence how government leaders allocate funds for government programs and services, including IT. The issue of declining IT budgets is more acute in some jurisdictions and geographic regions than others.

However, in the emerging digital ecosystem of interconnected people, businesses and things, many nations and municipalities recognize that IT and digital services play an outsized role to support economic development, enable health system reform or underpin a smart infrastructure.1 For government agencies and programs to convincingly fulfill their designated missions, they must make strategic investments in IT, or risk perpetuating service models that are financially unsustainable in the long term.

Gartner has identified the 10 most important technology trends for government in 2015 in order to help CIOs and IT leaders assess critical strategic technologies and prioritize investments for their enterprises' or agencies' IT roadmaps (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Top 10 Technology Trends for Government

Source: Gartner (April 2015)

These strategic technology trends have substantial disruptive potential that is just beginning to materialize. They are predicted to reach an inflection point within the next three to five years. CIOs can capitalize on the value of these trends by first determining how they will impact government program operations or service delivery models, and then by building the organizational capabilities and capacity needed to support them.

Each trend is presented with its own distinct rationale and value proposition. However, many are interrelated. For example, citizen e-ID enables multichannel citizen engagement, and the Internet of Things (IoT) amplifies the power of edge analytics. Government CIOs should consider how the unique digital business strategy of their enterprise or agency affects the extent to which these trends may reinforce one another, and also consider the timing and sequence of when they are deployed.

When it comes to considering any new IT investment or selecting among alternatives, government CIOs should pose and seek answers to three business-centric questions: Does the proposed solution effectively engage the workforce and citizens? Will it connect government agencies and external partners, and support coordinated services in ways we cannot today? Can it be sustainably resourced and supported?

Accordingly, the 10 technology trends for government are grouped into three interrelated focus areas – engaging, connecting and resourcing – but the sequence is not intended to imply any prioritization. Rather, government CIOs can use this list of 10 trends to articulate their business value to executive leaders and program managers, and to provide them with technology guidance that clearly supports the agency's business needs.

Each of these trends relies on various technologies, services and practices, many of which are profiled in the "Hype Cycle for Digital Government, 2014."

Trend Description: The government workforce of the future will be populated with digitally literate employees, from frontline workers to top-level executives. In many jurisdictions, the growth rate of the public-sector workforce is likely to lag behind the private-sector workforce. This places a premium on employee satisfaction, productivity and effectiveness. Although the mission of most government programs may change very little, the nature of work and the culture of the workplace will change dramatically.

The digital workplace is shaped by the twin forces of consumerization (the migration of consumer-originated technologies to business or government organizations) and democratization (the widespread and easy access to technology products and services by people without specialized IT expertise). This creates the conditions for a work environment in which employees are more agile and engaged because the environment is centered on consumer-oriented styles and technologies.

CIOs and IT leaders must build a more social, mobile, accessible and information-driven work environment to exploit rapidly changing business conditions. Executing a digital workplace initiative requires the use of familiar project management tasks, such as frameworks and roadmaps. However, unlike productivity initiatives of the past, digital workplace initiatives are not traditional IT projects. CIOs and human resources (HR) or personnel directors must work together to contextualize and personalize the workplace for each worker within the systems and culture of a larger organizational structure. This means supplementing standard project management practices with tools, such as social network analysis and social sciences (for example, anthropology and ethnography), to understand how employees perform work in social networks.

At the same time, advances in machine learning will create a new category of applications (such as virtual personal assistants and smart advisors), as well as more dynamic content and intelligent referral services, thereby ushering in a new era of computer-assisted work. In the digital workplace, smart devices will take an increasing role in making material decisions that impact humans in one way or another. These advances will accelerate the practical separation between work, social and private life in the actions of employees and employers alike.

Key Findings:

• An employee-centric mindset forces organizations to rethink how employee needs are assessed, and how applications and programs are constructed.
• The digital workplace, when it is properly designed, results in a more social, mobile, accessible and data-driven work environment.
• Digital workplace organizational change activities often are an afterthought, and commonly are associated with training.

Implications: Most people who are drawn to a life of public service want to make a difference in the world. They desire work that is meaningful and challenging. To be high-impact performers, government employees require a flexible work environment that supports the devices, individual learning styles and user experiences that they are familiar with in their personal lives. Employee preferences are accommodated, not disregarded.

The digital workplace provides employees with clarity and accurate feedback on which they can act. A central feature of the digital workplace is immediate and continuous access to external and internal data and real-time analytics so that employees can make data-driven decisions with the aid of smart devices and cognitive computing.

The digital workplace is an open, flat and democratic environment. It is the organizational manifestation of open government. There are no barriers preventing collaborative networks from forming and then dispersing. Improved technology enables knowledge to spread more easily.

Government CIOs and IT leaders who are responsible for today's workplace technologies – such as email, portals and content management – must learn how a digital workplace will affect the customary dependencies on those capabilities as workforce demographics skew younger, not to mention how the nature of risk will change in a fully digital environment. Government CIOs, in particular, must discover the emerging opportunity, if not the imperative, to take a leadership role in driving a digital workplace.

Recommendations for Government CIOs and IT Leaders:

• Establish the technology direction of your digital workforce strategy by evaluating interconnected societal trends – such as demographic shifts, changing roles and responsibilities, digital lifestyles, and collaborative work models – as well as organization-specific consumer preferences and shadow IT investments.
• Develop a common vision for the digital workplace, and make sure it is generally understood and has a consistent message.
• Connect digital workplace efforts to existing activities wherever possible. Executive management, HR, corporate communications or individual line-of-business managers may have tactical projects underway that can be leveraged to support a broader digital workplace program.

Trend Description: A multichannel strategy is a high-level articulation of how an enterprise will leverage operating channels, so that each can be optimized in its own right and, when integrated with the other channels, deliver measurable benefits for all stakeholders.

In government, a multichannel strategy is required to provide ready access to services by nearly all demographic groups in a population, regardless of socioeconomic status or physical limitations. An effective multichannel strategy uses market segmentation to group citizens into various constituencies; many citizens view "the government" as a single, undifferentiated entity, even when they are being served by numerous agencies and programs. Citizens are largely unconcerned about where the boundaries between jurisdictions or tiers of government begin and end. What they do care about is the quality of the interactions they have with government.2 They also expect "the government" to seamlessly resolve any back-office complexity or perceived "red tape" that gets in the way of accurate, personalized service delivered though any mode they choose.3

As digital business takes hold, overall citizen engagement and user experience will depend on providing retail-grade multichannel access to government services. Citizens' baseline expectations about government performance are shaped by how private-sector businesses accommodate their needs and preferences. Ratings that reflect citizen satisfaction and the achievement of desired outcomes will become increasingly important in how government programs are evaluated, and, ultimately, in the amount of funding they receive at the program or policy level.

A multichannel strategy, in the context of digital government, means more than delivering a seamless (or contiguous) experience to stakeholders. It also is about delivering interactions that are connected, consistent, convenient, collaborative, customized, clear and transparent. This is not simply providing uniform services that are consistent across channels. Government must balance the need for consistency against the unique advantages of each channel, such as the location-aware services available through mobile channels. Consequently, a multichannel strategy needs to consider the role of each channel when developing use cases, and determine how each one may affect outcomes or user experience.

Key Findings:

• Government jurisdictions with multiple channels (municipal offices, physical mail correspondence, contact centers, e-government websites and mobile apps) are struggling to provide their citizens with one coherent view of the enterprise.
• Many current IT practices in government are technology-focused or process-focused, and are insufficient for creating people-centered environments that are more responsive to end-user needs.
• The role and importance of traditional primary channels, such as physical ''branch" offices or contact centers, will change in the course of implementing a multichannel strategy.

Implications: Government agencies operate in multiple channels, but citizens are the ones who initiate and control how they want to interact with agencies in and across those channels. Therefore, citizens can choose to complete an end-to-end business transaction through one or more channels. This means processes must be capable of "crossing over" channels at any point in the workflow. To be successful, government agencies should focus on providing a frictionless experience for citizens, regardless of their channel preference. This may require taking a consistent approach to how citizens or workers authenticate with any given service. Wherever possible, credentials should be the same across different channels to provide equivalent functionality and assurance levels across each channel, and to avoid end-user confusion.

Multichannel citizen engagement starts with the outcomes that favorably affect customer experience and achieve program goals for the target constituency or group. To produce those outcomes, policymakers and CIOs must radically redesign service models by combining traditional marketing tools (such as focus groups, user experience labs, surveys and stakeholder analysis) with new approaches (such as citizen co-creation initiatives, agile development and design thinking).4

Business leaders and CIOs also need to ensure that the policy, business processes and IT infrastructure supporting the multichannel strategy are flexible, iterative and responsive to changing citizen needs. Technology capabilities supporting digital government will enable stakeholders to quickly and easily connect, collaborate and co-create.

In the broader context of a digital society that is fast-moving and transient, government IT organizations need to adopt agile procurement, agile infrastructure and agile development processes to mirror citizen behavior in a multichannel environment.

Recommendations for Government CIOs:

• Establish a team within your organization that is primarily focused on citizen-facing processes in order to break down the barriers between functional silos and support seamless cross-channel processes, with the goal of reducing the use of nondigital legacy channels (such as paper).
• Develop an application development model that moves responsibility for channel-specific functionality to channel-specific developers who are governed by multichannel master data management and multichannel master content management policies and standards.
• Identify and use customer-centric metrics for single-channel and cross-channel processes in order to monitor channel effectiveness and multichannel dynamics. Establish additional key performance indicators or data requirements needed for ongoing improvements and optimization.

Trend Description: Open any data in government results from "open by default" governance policies and information management practices, which make license-free data available in machine-readable formats to anyone who has the right to access it without any requirement for identification or registration. Open data is published as collected at the source ("raw") at the lowest granularity, as determined by privacy, security or data quality considerations. Open data is accessible with open APIs and is not subject to any trademark or copyright.

The number and variety of public-facing open datasets and Web APIs published by all tiers of governments worldwide continue to increase.5 Government budget and spending data, medical claims payment data, environmental hazards, census statistics, legislation, and transportation timetables are examples of popular published open datasets. The U.S. Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (aka DATA Act) is an example of a national government requiring agencies to post aggregated federal spending information on an open data platform, and in formats that permit users to download the data in bulk.

The Global Open Data Index, operated and maintained by Open Knowledge, tracks the availability and accessibility of state or local, regional and national government open data worldwide. Large-scale events (such as the National Day of Civic Hacking) and global open data support organizations (such as the Open Government Partnership) are sustaining open data's momentum.

Key Findings:

• Government open data is here to stay, but it will take a decade or more before its maximum utility is realized.
• The rapid growth of open datasets among early-mover organizations and flat or declining budgets create sustainability challenges to government open data programs.
• Cultural resistance and institutional barriers can slow down the internal use of open data to support innovation and improve public services.
• Innovation within government and in other sectors of the economy occurs when data is easily collected, published and reused, no matter where it originates – whether it is from people, digital business operations, or things such as sensors or devices.

Implications: When government planners draft a business case to establish an open data program, two key considerations often are overlooked. First, not all open data needs to be public data. Agencies that are moving into higher levels of open government maturity publish their previously inaccessible data in open data format for the internal use of government only. By determining which open datasets to make public and which to keep behind the firewall, agency business executives can increase data exchange within government, improve agency performance and program outcomes, and justify the cost of open data programs.

The need to sustain growing open data programs leads to the second point: Open data is not free. For most government agencies, open data programs are an unfunded or underfunded cost center. In 2014, Gartner predicted that, by 2017, more than 60% of government open data programs that do not effectively use open data internally will be scaled back or discontinued.

The "value" of open data must become tangible to government in terms of how its availability can quantifiably contribute to operational efficiency or effectiveness, let alone how it supports economic development, national productivity or commercial ventures. Ultimately, open data must deliver measurable, positive business results in order for government agencies to continue financing and enhancing open data programs.

Recommendations for Government CIOs:

• Work with your agency executives to identify and prioritize high-value datasets that can be used to improve business processes or enhance business analytics. Enter into cooperative agreements with other public-sector and nongovernment organizations that can benefit from access to your internal (nonpublic) open data, or vice versa.
• Determine the total cost of the open data program, including personnel, Web API development, data quality and technical costs. Post the cost of each dataset that is published on your agency's public open data portal to remind end users that providing the service is not free, even if the data is.
• Manage the open data program as a business-led initiative that supports an enterprise digital strategy. Use information governance to focus on the value, reuse, risk and compliance potential of open data, and to address issues of data ownership (that is, data is a reusable enterprise asset or public good, and is not "owned" or limited for use by a single business program area).
• Use open data and analytics to discover complex interdependencies among agency programs or government vertical industries (such as healthcare, education and social services), to improve government performance, or to gain insight into citizen preferences.

Trend Description: It has been a long-standing yet elusive goal of many government planners to provide citizens with integrated and seamless access to all government services according to a "no wrong door" business model. This capability depends, in part, on finding a means to associate an individual with one unique and persistent identifier within the bounds of what is culturally acceptable and legally permissible in the jurisdiction.

Citizen electronic identification (e-ID) refers to an orchestrated set of processes and technologies managed by governments to provide a trusted domain for how public services will be accessed by citizens on any device or through any online channel (Web, mobile devices or applications) – and, in some cases, using smart card readers attached to PCs or kiosks. This orchestration works across multiple systems to enable citizens to authenticate for secure online connectivity in order to access commercial and government resources and services.

The proliferation of mobile devices, cloud computing and social media is speeding up the adoption of citizen e-ID programs and gaining renewed interest from governments to support political mandates. Examples include New York City's IDNYC program, which connects residents to services, programs and benefits (regardless of immigration status, homeless status or gender identity), or Dubai Smart Government's MyID service, which connects residents to support mobility programs.

While many jurisdictions continue to pursue government-issued credentials, in some cases, citizen e-ID implementations place governments in the role of identity brokers that rely on cloud and SaaS delivery models deployed by trusted commercial partners (such as the U.K.'s GOV.UK Verify). However, identity proofing for citizen e-ID is relatively expensive, which limits its broader acceptance. Therefore, a market is forming – but is not fully emerged – for strong, reusable identity credentials. Not only will these arrangements seek efficiencies and economies of scale, and extend traditional on-premises deployments, but also they will speed up adoption rates.

Key Findings:

• Citizen e-ID projects are shaped by cultural norms about convenience versus privacy, regulatory constraints, technical environments and demographic preferences.
• To be successful, citizen e-ID programs require a trusted relationship between government and commercial vendors, with a focus on business value, interoperability and user experience.
• Citizen e-ID initiatives will increasingly support cloud-based federated identity services that can be more easily incorporated into private-sector business workflows.

Implications: Vendor solution providers no longer exclusively rely on back-end automation and report generation for traditional identity and access management (IAM) approaches and infrastructure. The focus of citizen e-ID services is shifting to front-end usability and business value, system interoperability, and user experience (such as provisioning of resources, system personalization and management oversight of user accounts).

This change in approach is driven by the use of external identity credentials that are managed with a federated governance model in distributed IT environments. Some credentials are provided by e-ID projects, wherein identity information from one domain is cross-referenced to access directory resources in another domain in order to enable single sign-on.

Regardless of whether a government agency serves as the primary citizen e-ID identity broker or contracts with a commercial IAM as a service (IDaaS) provider, CIOs must ensure that personal privacy and data confidentiality requirements are met.

Recommendations for Government CIOs:

• Determine what kind of consent management systems – and what levels of granular consent capabilities – are needed to record and enforce the privacy and data sharing preferences of individuals, according to the norms in your jurisdiction.
• Evaluate the feasibility of any proposed citizen e-ID initiative according to the criteria of business value, interoperability and user experience.
• Form an ecosystem of identity service brokers that enables government and commercial entities to provide services to designated stakeholders – without incurring the cost of identity creation, proofing and management.

Trend Description: Analytics is rapidly evolving from a separate and distinct business function into a fluid aspect of system operations and user experiences. This development allows leading government agencies to move beyond traditional, reactive dashboards and business intelligence (BI) tools to process models where analytics take place at the point of service to inform context-based decisions. The capabilities of edge analytics are particularly relevant as government CIOs and agency program leaders design new mobile services that are augmented by situational context and real-time interactions.

Edge analytics possess three distinct characteristics. Primarily, they are advanced – they apply predictive and prescriptive algorithms and cognitive computing to make real-time assessments about what will happen or what should happen. Second, edge analytics are pervasive. They are embedded into business processes and applications to deliver responsive and agile organizational performance. Finally, edge analytics are invisible. They operate continuously in the background, tracking user activity, processing sensor and environmental data, dynamically adjusting workflows to enhance the user experience, or managing activities during events as they unfold.

Key Findings:

• Industry collaboration around "fog computing" and distributed intelligence – the extension of cloud computing and analytic capabilities to the edge of the network – is creating a viable ecosystem of computing services, data, storage, networking resources and application services for smart city initiatives and personalized citizen services.
• Edge analytics are being driven by: (1) its use in supporting high-scale, high-throughput and low-latency applications that bridge public, private and hybrid clouds; (2) the velocity dimension of big data; (3) real-time and high-performance analytics requirements; and (4) the need for greater situation and location awareness in business processes or dynamic events.
• Government programs such as public safety, justice, tax and revenue, natural resource management, public health and healthcare, or social case management provide a rich set of use cases in which edge analytics can be applied to enhance program performance or transform service delivery models.

Implications: Governments in all jurisdictions, from federal or national agencies to smart cities or metropolitan regions, will run on an application-centric digital infrastructure in which everything – objects, people, processes and data – is connected and integrated using common architectures, interoperability and open standards. Program evaluation, service utilization management, policy or contract compliance, and fraud detection are among the functional business areas that can be enhanced and continuously monitored with edge analytics.

Edge analytics make sense of the patterns found in data streaming from the IoT, in combination with huge volumes of transactional data. This contrasts with established BI solutions that are built to function on more limited datasets and with a more traditional data warehouse approach. In government, BI tools primarily have been used to query systems of record, such as enterprise asset management, ERP, CRM, claims processing or case management systems. Edge analytics supplement these data sources with data from operations systems that manage and control physical processes, such as public telematics initiatives that aim to improve traffic flow, congestion or toll collection.

CIOs who are charged with implementing a digital government business strategy can partner with vendors that have integrated advanced analytics with their technology stacks to leverage data in real time, in order to support automated action and decisioning at the edges of the service delivery network. Industry-formed groups, such as the Industrial Internet Consortium, are working to create the reference architecture and promote the standards needed for interoperability exchange, and to analyze data throughout the government service ecosystem.

Recommendations for Government CIOs:

• Assess your agency's analytical needs and your organization's analytical capabilities. Identify areas where additional investments in hardware, software, business process modeling, workforce skills and staff are needed to support a digital business strategy and data initiatives.
• Develop business use cases that embed analytical processes and results into the end user's normal flow of activity, and that present insights or assess risks at the point and time of action.
• Identify additional sources of internal and external data that can augment existing data, and identify the requirements needed to integrate data into existing processes for analysis.
• Break down the traditional silo barriers between transactional and analytics systems to enable next-generation applications by streaming data directly to intelligent business operations systems that can dynamically execute business processes that use or react to information.

Trend Description: Government agencies are starting to increasingly rely on data exchange with external partners in order to optimize their service delivery networks and business functions, such as cross-boundary collaboration and service coordination, monitoring, and outcomes reporting.

Interoperability is the ability of two or more systems or products to seamlessly exchange and use information, regardless of the architectures and technologies they have been built on, in a manner that is invisible to the user. Interoperability at the technical, syntactic (such as XML or SQL) and semantic levels is the means by which digitally enabled value chains can effectively span on-premises legacy custom applications, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products and cloud-based services.

Scalable interoperability offers government CIOs, enterprise architects and business process analysts an incremental, "just enough" approach to architecture and standards to deliver "soon enough" value, as defined by prioritized, high-value use cases. By narrowing the scope of interoperability initiatives, a motivated community of interest – that is, stakeholders who receive tangible benefits from improved data exchange – can agree to use application-neutral and source-neutral extensible identifiers, formats and protocols (such as HTTP, uniform resource identifier [URI], JavaScript Object Notation [JSON], XML, Atom or OAuth) to achieve mutual goals.

Scalable interoperability pragmatically applies the principle of "interoperability by design" in enterprise information architecture so that government IT leaders can establish platforms to bridge information silos, improve data quality and reconcile long-standing semantic issues across systems. All new IT acquisitions and services should adhere to the interoperability-by-design principle.

Key Findings:

• Governance, finance and project management challenges for cross-cutting interoperability and information exchange programs are rising disproportionately to the number of organizational boundaries crossed.
• Low levels of interoperability and information exchange among government agencies and nongovernment partners are barriers to efficient and effective public service integration and orchestration.
• Scalable interoperability establishes an incremental path to information sharing by applying a pragmatic approach to interoperability-by-design practices. Interoperability by design seeks to balance the technical architecture layer of data exchange with the information architecture layer of semantic reconciliation.

Implications: Data interoperability poses a major challenge for government CIOs as they shift from an IT service model that is based primarily on internal development (inside-out) to one centered on co-development and information exchange using externally shared infrastructures (outside-in). To make this shift, government CIOs and enterprise architects must focus on stable, general dependencies, relationships and interfaces by adopting an enterprise architecture (EA) middle-out approach based on Web-oriented architecture (WOA) principles, and on the sharing of information delivered through the universal platform of the Internet and Internet protocols.

System heterogeneity requires CIOs and enterprise architects to pursue strategies dealing with the differences that are barriers to interoperability – for example, purchasing COTS software with a library of prebuilt adapters to negotiate the interfaces between particular COTS applications and COTS SaaS packages relevant to the program's business needs. Where such COTS functionality is not available and the business case warrants, evaluate integration platform-as-a-service offerings that have tools to enable crowdsourcing of integration interfaces or software adapters, self-service portals, and integration artifacts.

In addition to speed to solution, scalable interoperability emphasizes data quality and reliability. Interface development time and costs can be reduced with conformance testing of interoperability between systems and information exchanges. For example, the Aegis.net Developers Integration Lab provides a platform for self-service automated, Internet-based interoperability testing against Nationwide Health Information Network (NwHIN) specifications and implementations.

Interoperability potentially offers government CIOs a phased "step-down, step-up" transition path from legacy systems to the cloud. When business functions migrate off-premises to the cloud, data in legacy systems can continue to remain in use as the new cloud service is brought online.

Greater interoperability can upend business operations, laws or policies, and management practices that predate the rise of open standards and systems. While agency executives and partners recognize the importance of tracking outcomes, few have restructured service delivery to support an outcome-based model. A key point of contention is "who gets credit" when multiple participants contribute to producing a shared result or positive outcome. This is no small consideration when zero-based budgeting, pay-for-performance contracts or value-based purchasing can influence the future funding levels of program operations. To resolve this tension, detailed interoperability use cases and value stream maps and data flows for end-to-end services must be developed.

Targeted cross-boundary use cases – such as those described in the draft version of the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology's (ONC's) "Connecting Health and Care for the Nation: A Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap" – and associated value stream mapping can help determine the relative contribution of, appropriate performance measures of and equitable distribution of payment for services among participants or entities in the value chain. Ultimately, data interoperability facilitates greater collaboration, and produces the transparency and accountability for outcomes that justify program budgets and optimal resource allocation.

Recommendations for Government CIOs:

• When procuring new IT systems or services, include requirements to conform to accredited or "best available" interoperability frameworks, open standards and data formats, such as NIEM (National Information Exchange Model), HL7 FHIR (Health Level Seven Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) or XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language). Add bonus points for vendors that present proof of independent (third party) interoperability testing and a product interoperability roadmap.
• Illustrate the value of interoperability with compelling use cases and civic moment scenarios in order to enlist other government agencies, private-sector companies and nonprofit organizations in the innovative thinking and collaborative end-to-end process design required to improve program performance and outcomes.
• Initiate an interoperability pilot project that is narrowly scoped to manage governance, finance, policy, data quality, technology, security and organizational change management risks. Extend the scale and scope of future interoperability initiatives as your technology and partner ecosystems mature.

Trend Description: The digitalization of business is an international phenomenon sweeping through all sectors of the global economy, including the public sector. Widespread application of cloud, mobile, social and information technologies – often expressed in the synergistic effects of big data analytics and smart devices connected by the IoT – is beginning to dissolve traditional barriers across industries. Old business and service models are breaking down under the weight of costly, inefficient processes that produce inconsistent outcomes. Government agencies, like private-sector companies, are challenged by the rise of agile and fluid ecosystems that are capable of using digital data to quickly discover and exploit new opportunities, or to solve long-standing problems.

The pervasive use of cloud, mobile, social and information technologies is not only blurring the established boundaries between government agencies, but also making the borders between regional jurisdictions and among the tiers of government less defined. To citizens who view "government" as a monolithic entity, the borders that define cities, counties, provinces, states and nations are of less importance than the quality of public services delivered at a price that the economy (and taxpayers) can sustainably support. In digital business, citizens should no longer have to navigate among various agencies and programs through vertical, first generation e-government Web portals in order to locate the services they seek.

Cross-domain fluidity requires an optimized IT infrastructure – an ecosystem of integrated technologies, middleware, and interoperable, configurable COTS applications – that is designed to be as indifferent to how government is organized as citizens are. Deploying a flexible solution architecture that is open and extensible is particularly critical when departments and programs consolidate, dissolve, transfer or reconsolidate according to the shifting dictates of successive election and budget cycles.

Key Findings:

• The digitalization of society is driving government to become more open and horizontally aware across adjacent domains (such as education, social services, healthcare and associated public-private partnerships) in order to integrate and coordinate services to improve outcomes and citizen experiences.
• Framework technologies, EA reference models and industry standards have matured to the point that stable and extensible best-of-breed platforms can be architected.
• Institutional factors such as governance, financing or organizational resistance to change are greater barriers to the adoption of enterprise-level platform solutions than the technologies are.

Implications: A digital government platform incorporates service-oriented architecture (SOA) design patterns for the provision and use of enterprise services across multiple vertical business domains, systems and processes. Digital government platforms can be deployed on-premises, as a private cloud, or hosted, and they support event capture and processing, data exchange and analysis (internal and external information coming from multiple sources), user interfaces, and interoperability between applications across different domains, tiers and constituencies. Leveraging data generated from smart devices and the IoT is a critical capability of any digital government platform.

E-government frameworks and platforms have been around for more than a decade, usually as part of product and consulting vendor offerings. Over the past few years, some of them have morphed into platforms supporting smart city programs. These platforms are close to providing some of the basic functionality to support the Gartner concept of "digital civic moments" – that is, events that trigger a series of cascading actions and data exchanges across a network of people, businesses, organizations and things to achieve a singular objective. Data can be internal and external to government. The platform architecture should consist of services that are compliant with industry standards in order to facilitate reuse, adaptability and interoperability.

Vendor offerings are still at an early stage, and they focus primarily on supporting smart cities; examples include IBM Smarter Cities, Microsoft CityNext, Cisco Smart+Connected Communities, SAP Urban Matters, Oracle's Solutions for Smart Cities and Capgemini's Global Cities. Despite their focus on operational technologies and the IoT, these platforms address many of the issues pertaining to the data exchange and event triggering that are typical of digital government. Domain-specific platforms, such as the Accenture Public Service Platform or IBM Cúram Solutions, bring a platform approach to health and social services.

Recommendations for Government CIOs:

• Socialize the value of digital government platforms by working with business leaders and program managers to model business capabilities in a way that is accessible and links to measurable business outcomes. Use the expertise of your enterprise architects to facilitate business capability modeling workshops.
• Evaluate digital government platforms in terms of the incremental expansion of functionality over time on a base that is scalable and extensible in expanding capabilities to transform service models and meet future digital government business needs.
• Assume a "one platform provider and multiple software vendors" approach in which one platform-as-a-service vendor provides technical, data and business services, such as a server storage, networking, virtualization, middleware, database management, analytics or workflow. Other COTS software vendors are plugged into or integrated with the primary vendor's platform.
• Understand how effectively other government clients leveraged the selected vendor's platform solution to support service delivery transformation, and whether the organizational change management program was adequately resourced.

Trend Description: The IoT is the network of physical objects (fixed or mobile) that contains embedded technology to communicate, monitor, sense or interact with multiple environments. For government, the IoT enables new levels of flexibility, reliability and collaboration for supporting the digital transformation of service strategies, regardless of data ownership, to create, collect, analyze and make decisions based on different data types and sources. The use of these sensor-enabled connections is growing rapidly in many industries, and these connections are increasingly being used by mobile apps.

The first wave of the Internet connected people with one another. The second wave is connecting things with other things and people with the things that surround them. The IoT is more than just technology-enabled sensors in devices. It is an architectural paradigm that makes embedded computing technology part of a broader ecosystem of capabilities that underpins entirely new products and services.

Government agencies can expect IoT-driven changes in several different areas, including environmental or public infrastructure monitoring, emergency response, supply chain inspection, asset and fleet management, and traffic safety. Wearable devices and mobile health monitoring devices will collect lifestyle, behavioral and health data that will help manage the costs of publicly financed health insurance and healthcare programs.

Key Findings:

• The IoT presents a massively diverse and complex set of business and technology opportunities that requires the use of formal ideation practices and business scenarios as a basis to understand how value can be generated.
• The IoT demands application architectures, networks and middleware that are unfamiliar to most IT organizations.
• Sensor-based and other IoT systems must be linked to data and information management, with security and information access governance, as well as business enablers and operational cost savings.

Implications: Data is central to digital government, and information is the lifeblood of an IoT strategy. Organizations that don't define an "information of everything" strategy will risk legal, regulatory and reputational exposure.

The IoT will change technical architectures. Data, processing and interfaces can exist at multiple levels. Government CIOs and IT leaders should consider how and where to apply five key architectural styles to their IoT projects: (1) thing-centric, where a thing, whether it is a sensor or smart device, carries the greatest load of data processing; (2) gateway-centric, where the thing is relatively dumb and a gateway in the field is the primary control point; (3) smartphone-centric, where the smartphone acts as a hub for other IoT objects (for example, wearables); (4) cloud-centric, where a cloud service is the major point of application execution and things must be connected to operate; and (5) enterprise-centric, where things are more tightly anchored onto existing IT systems.

Government CIOs and IT leaders will need to look beyond EA to ecosystem architectures that incorporate citizens, employees, partners and the things that are important to each of them. Managing risk in adopting IoT technologies requires increased collaboration with public-sector peers, or studying related but different private-sector industries in order to evaluate best practices or lesson learned.

Recommendations for Government CIOs:

• Approach the IoT strategically to evaluate how a growing base of intelligent objects and equipment can be combined with traditional Internet and IT systems to support breakthrough innovations in operational performance or public service delivery.
• Familiarize key staff members with IoT concepts and technologies to ensure that they are ready to make informed decisions about strategies, products, architectures and services as IoT requirements emerge.
• Develop an interoperability strategy to gain sustainable and extensible business value from IoT initiatives. Focus on business outcomes, scenarios and defined business information to determine your approach to interoperability.

Trend Description: Government agencies – particularly those serving large populations, or whose missions span wide geographic regions – can no longer afford to have their growing needs for innovation and agility limited by legacy infrastructure, suboptimal business processes, and linear development methods that are inflexible and insufficiently scalable.

"Web-scale IT," a term coined by Gartner, describes how enterprises can attain efficiencies that rival the cloud – when cloud is not an acceptable option – by emulating how applications and services are designed to operate in cloud architectures. This requires a re-examination of IT conventional wisdom in several areas, including: (1) how to build out (and populate) data centers; (2) how to design and develop applications so that they are scalable and delivered quickly to the market, and so they are resilient in case of failure; and (3) how to develop operational processes that are complementary to a more agile environment.

Web-scale IT is a system-oriented architectural pattern of global-class computing that delivers the capabilities of large cloud service providers within an enterprise IT organization (see Note 1). Web-scale IT enables the rapid and scalable development and delivery of Web-based IT services that leverage agile, lean and continuous delivery principles.

Web-scale IT focuses on not only the ability to scale IT-related facilities and technology, but also the associated operational processes and supporting organizational structure. Perhaps most importantly, however, is the ability to reshape an organization's IT culture by encouraging unconventional thinking.

For government, the shift to Web-scale IT is a long-term trend with significant IT process, cultural and technology implications.

Key Findings:

• Web-scale IT is the result of the demand to create global-class cloud services to address the increasingly complex client environment, using automation and other software-defined and policy-based models to drive speed and agility.
• Loosely coupled, WOA-based software architectures are enabling development teams to increasingly operate independently, while improving overall application resiliency.
• The influence of DevOps on IT culture, tools, processes and organizational structures is resulting in the acceleration of application delivery and an environment of continuous experimentation (see Note 2).

Implications: Web-scale IT is disrupting the status quo with regard to vendors and business end users. Enterprises adopting a Web-scale IT philosophy will largely eschew the acquisition of expensive, scalable computing, storage and networking resources in favor of lower-cost, open-source-derived hardware that bypasses the traditional infrastructure "middlemen." Consequently, traditional IT suppliers will become less relevant to government CIOs and IT leaders, as will traditional modes of IT service delivery. For example, IT production engineering and operations support teams will increasingly reject ITIL-based manageability approaches (and their associated consulting organizations), and adopt more lean and agile governance models that are designed to better complement agile development efforts.

Web-scale IT leverages four characteristics:

• Information-fueled: Digital government applications and infrastructure rely on information to drive the behavior of the IT environment, which allows for extensive automation and deep analytical capabilities to help IT organizations understand operational efficiencies and program effectiveness. The multichannel citizen engagement, edge analytics and IoT trends will drive the shift to Web-scale IT.
• Software-defined-anything-enabled and cloud/client-modeled: Building off the power of software-defined anything allows organizations to have next-level automation, granular control of IT processes, reduced reliance on hardware for resilience, increased flexibility in throttling performance, and allowance for new capabilities without hardware upgrades. Cloud/client models and WOAs establish the delivery model and user experience for software-defined architecture styles.
• Built-in IT continuity: Since Web-scale IT is modeled on large, multitenant cloud providers, it is designed to automatically remediate hardware and software failures through an architecture that doesn't have a single point of failure to compromise the other solutions.
• Industrially designed data centers: Design approaches pioneered by large Web firms are expanding into the enterprise. The new models disaggregate for cost, design for efficiency, are engineered for serviceability and are architected for agility. The use of the word "Web" in "Web-scale IT" does not restrict the approach to citizen-facing e-government applications. Web-scale IT also includes systems that derive their architecture from SOA, including service-oriented infrastructure and REST-based principles.

Web-scale IT takes advantage of the architecture concepts behind the large public cloud to bring global-class capabilities to the enterprise:

• Increased organizational agility: This enables new products, services and enhanced business insights by reducing complexity and the time to build solutions, along with providing a connected IT ecosystem of information and technology.
• Low total cost of ownership: This helps government agencies deliver more capabilities at a lower operational cost by driving down the costs of labor required to create solutions; it reduces IT infrastructure and software costs; and it is able to monitor and charge customers according to the peak-hours or off-hours utilization needs of a service.
• Predictable scale: This provides a continuously running infrastructure that is able to scale based on the compute needs, with a seemingly limitless potential demand for computing usage.

Recommendations for Government CIOs:

• Prepare for the deployment of a Web-scale IT architecture by involving the IT organization in initiatives such as the Open Compute Project and the Open Data Center Alliance. CIOs of smaller jurisdictions should evaluate how Web-scale IT capabilities can be obtained through consortia or the public cloud.
• Adopt SOA and software-defined architecture to deliver managed agility in software for digital government services.
• Create a roadmap that defines your organization's Web-scale IT infrastructure strategy, including the investment gaps, future impacts to existing infrastructure, and competencies that will be needed to execute this strategy.
• Use DevOps and WOA to incrementally build out an industrial-grade infrastructure.

Trend Description: Hybrid IT offers government CIOs a new operating model that supports their IT departments' ability to combine and manage on-premises infrastructure or internal private cloud with external cloud-based environments (community, public or hybrid) simultaneously (see Note 3). Hybrid IT is how IT departments are organized to secure, deliver, manage and govern these environments.

Gartner advises most (if not all) organizations to move in the direction of a hybrid architecture in order to take advantage of the different resources and service delivery models. In government, where consolidation is high on many agendas, a hybrid IT model requires very different competencies to support various public cloud deployments.

Most implementations of private cloud computing are following those of the public cloud – to develop new applications that are dynamically composed from standardized components and bound to the infrastructure at runtime. As a result, the next generation of private and hybrid cloud computing solutions will better support agile methodologies and DevOps initiatives, thereby accelerating the time-to-solution cycle that Web, mobile and digital business applications demand.

Key Findings:

• Increased multisourcing and cloud adoption is making it more complex to manage end-to-end services in a hybrid IT environment, thereby driving government CIOs to find new ways to manage and deliver run-based services.
• IT organizations want to optimize the placement of services across the public cloud and on-premises private clouds, preserve flexibility in using multiple cloud providers, and reduce lock-in.
• The hybrid IT service function within an organization will become one of the most critical technology and partnering investments made by enterprises, and will influence how IT makes decisions on all technologies and IT services used by the enterprise.

Implications: Hybrid IT requires new organizational roles and structures, whereby the infrastructure and operations organization can assume and/or delegate responsibility to external IT service providers, multisourcing service integrators and cloud service brokerages (CSBs) to deliver the IT services it needs. Cloud management platform tools are used to ensure the best utilization of cloud-based IT resources through proper management.

As government IT progressively loses total control over IT purchases, and as business units increase their influence over those decisions, government CIOs must focus on building the institutional capacity to manage cloud technology, and on preparing their IT organizations to adopt a more business-centric service model to deliver faster IT solutions through a diversified portfolio of resources that includes hybrid cloud solutions.

Many government CIOs struggle to modernize or migrate legacy systems to new platforms without disrupting business services. There are few examples where cloud has proved to be a viable option, despite expectations to the contrary. Hybrid cloud provides a mechanism to further leverage legacy environments without needing to redevelop them.

Government CIOs will need to reposition IT organizations from being full-service providers of IT services to being their agencies' preferred brokers and managers of services offered predominantly through the cloud. As the IT organization assumes cloud intermediary responsibilities, its success will be demonstrated by how effectively it can accelerate the time to solution, derive cost savings from cloud usage and protect the enterprise's information assets.

Thus, government CIOs and IT leaders' new core competencies will become advising the business on best practices to procure and administer cloud services while integrating with traditional on-premises or outsourced services.

Recommendations for Government CIOs:

• Establish policies, operational processes, business relationships and technologies that strategically leverage multisourcing options (cloud and noncloud, on-premises and off-premises, and private/public/hybrid cloud).
• Create an intermediary organization (hybrid IT function) to assist with cloud governance, integration, aggregation and customization for your cloud projects. Smaller jurisdictions should consider contracting with a CSB.
• Design private cloud services with future public cloud integration and interoperability in mind, including hybrid cloud computing. Establish requirements for vendors to support open, standard northbound APIs in order to maximize flexibility and minimize lock-in.

Fog computing Industry collaboration around "fog computing" – the extension of cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the network – is providing data, storage and application services to end users and smart devices.

1 The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), "Measuring the Digital Economy: A New Perspective," OECD Publishing, 8 December 2014.
2 Development Research Centre on Citizenship, Participation and Accountability, "Blurring the Boundaries: Citizen Action Across States and Societies," 2011.
3 United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, "United Nations E-Government Survey 2014: E-Government for the Future We Want," 2014.
4 T. Brown, "Design Thinking," Harvard Business Review, June 2008.
5 According to the ProgammableWeb Research Center, the count of government Web APIs has grown from 39 in 2009 to 338 in 2013.

Source: Gartner Research Note G00275801, Rick Howard, 28 April 2015