Half of Government IT Workers Will Have Roles That Don’t Exist Today by 2023

Gartner predicts that by 2023, 50 percent of the roles that government CIOs will oversee do not exist in government IT today.

The recent  CIO survey shows that the transition to digital government is gaining momentum. It found that 53 percent of digital initiatives in government organizations have moved from the design stage to early stages of delivering digitally driven outcomes. This is up from 40 percent last year.

Additionally, 39 percent of governments expect cloud services to be a technology area where they will spend the greatest amount of new or additional funding in 2019. To adapt to new skill requirements, CIOs need to initiate a transformation process that results in new or changed roles. Furthermore, the emergence of digital product management is changing how governments think about their services, and this will lead to the emergence of digital teams internally to design and deliver products.

In the future, government IT will also accomplish more diversified tasks than today. Public sector agencies will rely on government IT services to address inclusion, citizen experience and digital ethics. Those fields require new types of skillsets, such as researchers, designers and social scientists.

At the same time, government IT will need to assign new roles to support their digital transformation and introduce emerging technologies in diverse businesses and mission areas. As AI and IoT technologies advance, machine trainers, conversational specialists and automation experts will slowly but certainly replace experts in legacy technologies.

Gartner predicts that by 2023, over 80 percent of new technology solutions adopted by governments will be delivered and supported using an anything-as-a-service (XaaS) model. XaaS summarizes several categories of IT, including those delivered in the cloud as a subscription-based service. It also encompasses managed desktop, help desk and network services, voice over IP and unified communications.

However, the XaaS model also creates new challenges for government CIOs. In the early stages of adoption, business units may turn less to the IT department to deliver solutions, as they are now able to acquire XaaS solutions without the involvement or the resources of IT.