As the new year approaches, governments should be developing technology investment plans and setting priorities, writes Dean Lacheca.
Cybersecurity remains at the top of the priority list for 2025, as it was for 2024. The ongoing pressure to achieve Essential Eight compliance along with the new Cyber Security Act will see this remain a priority throughout the coming year.
The drive for AI adoption has renewed the focus on data and data management to improve the analytic capabilities of departments and ensure their critical data is AI ready. Beyond this, cloud platform adoption will continue to grow as governments press to reduce technical debt and associated risk.
When making digital technology investments in 2025, governments need to keep in mind critical outcomes. These will be largely dependent on the mission of the agency/department. Those with citizen-facing missions are strongly focussed on improving citizen experience, extending the inclusivity of government services, and improving the speed, consistency and efficiency of the government workforce to indirectly improve the citizen experience.
Those that are not citizen-facing are very focused on workforce productivity and are looking at all options for automation and technology-led efficiencies.
As for the top focus areas for chief information officers during 2025, the biggest shift year on year is a significant jump in the focus of government on efficiency and risk. They have always been drivers, but ongoing austerity across the region and a more conservative shift toward risk reduction and mitigation has seen this focus on human capital effectiveness.
This has seen the top priority for government CIOs being to manage technology risk. The austerity drive around Australia has also seen an increase in CIO focus on managing technology financials and communicating the value of IT.
There is a need for agility going forward
The top three technologies governments plan to deploy in 2025 are generative AI, AI and low-code/no-code development platforms. So what benefits will this provide for governments and how will these technologies help them achieve their mission objectives? There are slightly different motivations for the different technology investments.
Generative AI and AI adoption are linked directly into the desire to deliver improved citizen experience and to improve workforce productivity. Citizen-facing generative AI is expected to improve the quality of chatbots and virtual assistants as well as enable the path to conversational government services.
Internally, the drive for automation and efficiency is driving towards agentic AI, where AI supports and enables decision intelligence and the automation of internal processes.
Adoption of low-code/no-code development platforms by governments is also growing rapidly. This is a reflection of multiple challenges converging for governments. Firstly, governments have learnt from the impact of extensive customisation of base systems. The use of these contemporary platforms allows them to configure the behaviour of the system without creating a support challenge.
The next demand is the need for agility going forward. Adjusting government policy is often slow to implement due to legacy systems being difficult to change. Governments expect that these contemporary platforms offer them the capabilities to implement change more rapidly.
Though these platforms do enable change to be executed more effectively than those built in legacy technologies, they do not remove the need for extensive change management to mitigate the risk of change.
The other challenge faced by government is the lack of available resources with specialist skills. The expectation is that low-code platforms allow governments to source capability internally or from the market, with retaining existing resources a valid option.
Dean Lacheca is VP analyst at Gartner
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