Challenges to Implementing Digital Transformation in Government and Public Sector
For many government leaders, the benefits of embracing digital transformation solutions such as AI, IoT, cloud computing, and hybrid workforces are obvious, but the paths forward are many and often confusing to implement. Too often, government agencies are persuaded into deploying bespoke solutions designed to solve one problem, and years of legacy implementations stacked together produce multiple disparate systems that are incapable of sharing data or insights. The value of past technology investments is constrained when it should be multiplicative. Global disruptions—past, present, and future—and constituent demands only complicate matters further.
Success in Government Digital Transformation Starts with a Seamless Compute Continuum
The remedy to technology fragmentation is technology enablement, or deploying the right enterprise architecture in a seamless, scalable manner from end to end—from edge to core and from cloud to client. The result is a seamless compute continuum that can take data gathered and processed at the edge, flow it upstream to the cloud or data center core, and make it available to any authorized user.
Data mobility across the compute continuum is a foundational requirement to achieving the goals of government digital transformation, specifically resiliency and sustainability.
- Resiliency means designing and deploying future technology solutions better, faster, and in a way that lowers operational costs. These solutions should also offer the ability to maintain consistent, high-value services and predictable operations, even in the face of adverse conditions.
- Sustainability refers to creating healthier, safer, and cleaner environments. Sustainable solutions will meaningfully and measurably contribute to net-zero carbon and net-zero energy targets while also empowering constituents to pursue their own environmentally friendly solutions and habits.
The technology enablement of a seamless compute continuum is something agencies should take incrementally as resources become available. For example, deploying IoT sensors is a simple early step that can provide useful data to fuel resiliency and sustainability efforts, without overwhelming initial project budgets.
Cybersecurity as a Requirement to Realizing Digital Transformation Value
Making good on the promise of digital transformation also requires a robust end-to-end cybersecurity approach to help safeguard sensitive data as the network perimeter becomes wider and more complex. For example, hybrid workforces can enable agencies to be more resilient during a pandemic, supporting work-from-home policies that maintain productivity levels while keeping people safe. However, remote connections increase the attack surface of the organization’s network and expose potential vulnerabilities in client devices using more cloud apps and unprotected internet connections.
As governments pursue AI, automation, cloud, and IoT technologies they should also prioritize cybersecurity as an essential ingredient to the solution. Government cybersecurity that starts at the hardware level helps harden platforms no matter where they are, while remote manageability tools help IT departments deploy remedies fast and limit the impact of breaches, malware, and advanced threats like ransomware.
How Government Agencies Become Resilient
Resiliency starts with data mobility across the seamless compute continuum. Data mobility empowers departments to rapidly understand situations and environmental conditions and ultimately take predictive, preventive, or prescriptive actions to solve challenges.
- Predictive action means being able to anticipate new problems and new demands on infrastructure, as well as when these challenges will occur and at what scale. Predictive action seeks to put critical infrastructure into place so that when the inevitable happens, agencies are already prepared to handle it.
- Preventive action is the ability to not only predict potential demands or problems, but also to stop them from occurring in the first place. Rather than preparing for the inevitable, preventive action seeks to control and diminish demands before they become problems.
- Prescriptive action is the ability to quickly deploy a remedy when a disruption does occur. Not everything can be predicted nor prevented, so when the unpredictable happens, organizations need tools to solve the problem fast and limit the impact of the disruption.
How Government Agencies Become Sustainable
Sustainability efforts also lean on data mobility in a seamless compute continuum, but the main difference between sustainability and resiliency involves what applications the data supports. Sustainable solutions are focused on creating healthier, safer, and more-eco-friendly, carbon- and energy-neutral environments that benefit workers and the broad spectrum of government constituents.
Edge intelligence is a critical component to safer, cleaner environments. For example, AI vision solutions can help automate situational awareness by identifying anomalous behavior or hazards as they occur and alerting the right personnel to intervene. Likewise, sensors for things such as noise and air quality provide useful data to agencies to help measure the impact of services on local environments.
Sustainability Becomes More Effective with Constituent Participation
The ideal sustainability technology will not only give pathways for agencies to enable cleaner, safer environments but also support constituent participation by making environmental insights and data available to anyone. As a result, constituents can make smarter data-informed decisions about conservation and eco-friendly initiatives that they couldn’t make before.
When executed properly, these efforts also empower constituents to contribute their situational data into the sustainability workflow, which then supports further customization and new capabilities. In effect, this process transforms constituents into data-producing sources for ongoing sustainability efforts.
Get Help Building Your Digital Transformation Foundation
As you embark on planning and deploying a digitally capable, technologically forward enterprise foundation that can scale to meet the needs of your organization for years to come, the best advice is to not take this journey alone.
The Intel Ecosystem Accelerates Your Success
Intel not only brings technology leadership and expertise in the five superpowers of digital transformation—extensive sensoring, pervasive connectivity, ubiquitous compute, cloud and intelligent edge infrastructure, and powerful AI—but we can help accelerate your path forward with our expansive partner ecosystem. We work with partner organizations all over the world, in virtually every industry, to provide optimized and purpose-built solutions that satisfy present demands while anticipating future challenges.
Intel representatives have the expertise to connect government leaders with solution provider partners to help accelerate their desired outcome. No matter your technical or organizational challenge, the Intel ecosystem can help deliver the resiliency, sustainability, and technology enablement you need in a comprehensive, consolidated solution.
To get started, reach out to your Intel representative or government technology solutions vendor.