Government IT workers to occupy roles that don’t exist today

Government IT workers to occupy roles that don’t exist today

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More than half of the roles that government IT workers will perform by 2023 do not exist in government IT today, according to a new study.

Gartner Predicts 2019: Establish the Foundations for Next-Generation Digital Government Success report shows that the transition to digital government is gaining momentum.

The analyst found that 53 per cent of digital initiatives in government organisations have moved from the design stage to early stages of delivering digitally driven outcomes. This is up from 40 per cent last year.

“The move to digital business means that the IT organisation needs to adapt to new skills requirements,” said Cathleen Blanton, research vice president at Gartner.

“In many governments, roles of chief data officers and cloud architects are already present. However, it is worth noting that 38 per cent of government respondents did not introduce any new roles in 2018 due to insufficient resources, skills and cultural issues.”

To adapt to new skill requirements, CIOs need to initiate a transformation process that results in new or changed roles. For example, as cloud services become more prevalent, the number of data centre management roles will decline, the report states.

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, the analyst suggests.

This isn’t just a call to action for leaders working in government but across every sector. All leaders must drill down and examine the impact technologies such as AI will have on their organisations and predict which skills and capabilities will be required and which new roles need to be created

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 will require new types of skillsets, like 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 artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies advance, machine trainers, conversational specialists and automation experts will slowly but certainly replace experts in legacy technologies, Gartner cautions.

Commenting on the findings, Richard Chiumento, director of Rialto Consultancy, added: “This isn’t just a call to action for leaders working in government but across every sector. All leaders must drill down and examine the impact technologies such as AI will have on their organisations and predict which skills and capabilities will be required and which new roles need to be created. And this is at all levels of the organisation, including senior leadership.”