A substantial portion of government IT workers will soon find themselves occupying roles that don’t exist today, new research by Gartner has shown.

The Gartner CIO survey has predicted that, by 2023, 50 per cent of the roles that government CIOs will oversee do not exist in government IT today. This is a result of the transition to digital governments gaining momentum. It found that 53 per cent of digital initiatives in government organisations have moved from the design stage to the early stages of delivering digitally driven outcomes. This is up from 40 per cent last year. Additionally, 39 per cent of governments expects cloud services to be a technology area where they will spend the greatest amount of new or additional funding in 2019.

“These findings demonstrate that leadership has become more comfortable with cloud delivery models and has moved away from concerns regarding security and data ownership,” said Cathleen Blanton, research vice president at Gartner. “The move to digital business means that the IT organisation needs to adapt to new skills requirements. In many governments, the 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. 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 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,” Blanton said.

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 has also predicted that by 2023, over 80 per cent 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. The model offers an alternative to legacy infrastructure modernisation and investment. It’s a promising way to scale digital government because it can provide small local offerings as well as nation-wide services.