Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2023, 50 per cent of the roles that government chief information officers (CIO) will oversee do not exist today. As per the recent Gartner CIO survey, the transition to digital government is gaining momentum with 53 per cent of digital initiatives in government organisations having already moved from the design stage to the early stages of delivering outcomes.
Additionally, 39 per cent of the survey respondents expects cloud services to be a technology area where they will spend the greatest amount of new or additional funding in 2019.
The move to new digital business means that government-level IT organisation needs to adapt to new skills requirements. For example, as cloud services become more prevalent, the number of data center management roles will decline. Furthermore, the emergence of digital product management is changing how governments think about their services, and this will lead to the emergence of internal digital teams to design and deliver products.
Further in the future, government IT will also accomplish more diversified tasks than today, says Gartner. Public sector agencies will rely on government IT services to address inclusion, citizen experience and digital ethics and these fields require new types of skill sets, such as researchers, designers, and social scientists.
“Government CIOs must employ experts to model and explain how citizens and businesses will need to respond to regulations and policies, and what impact that will have on society, the economy and government revenues,” said Cathleen Blanton, Research Vice-President, Gartner.
As technologies like artificial intelligence and Internet of things advance, machine trainers, conversational specialists and automation experts will slowly but certainly replace experts in legacy technologies, it feels.