“World economies are experiencing moments of uncertainty as a possible recession starts to grow on the horizon, posing unpredictable challenges regarding public spending. Governments will face the challenge of adopting efficient technologies that allow them to innovate while keeping budgets under control,” said Jason Chang, Director of Industry Marketing at Liferay.
“After driving a great jump in digitalization in the past three years, IT leaders working in government will have to figure out how to maintain stable and sustained evolution from 2023 onward,” he added.
The report E-Government Survey 2022: The Future of Digital Government, from the United Nations, highlights that “Determining where to focus is essential for leaders with finite resources looking to truly move the needle on experience—and to promote critical outcomes linked to those efforts.”
Liferay develops a cloud-powered digital experience platform (DXP) used by government agencies worldwide to build portals, websites, and integration platforms.
With such uncertain times ahead, Liferay experts, who have been helping public sector entities on their path to digitalization for more than 15 years, identified the main challenges CIOs in government will face in 2023.
Liferay experts identified six major measures that the technology sectors must follow in order to face these challenges and help the government sector overcome the global recession:
Closing the Gap between Customer Experience and Citizen Experience
Citizens are accustomed to great consumer experiences, and the success of public sector operations is increasingly linked to their ability to provide similar experiences. In fact, the user experience will be a critical KPI in 2023’s digital economy when it comes to providing new government service delivery models.
McKinsey & Co., in the article The Global Case for Customer Experience in Government, observes that, “By investing in customer experience programs, we’ve found that agencies can address the priorities that matter to every government leader.”
In this context, it is worth mentioning that the public sector still has to improve in terms of usability and web design. Often, government sites are not attractive and have a poor user experience. To improve on that, IT teams will have to invest in user-centered design and define consistent design systems that work across all channels.
Turning Complex Legacy Ecosystems into Fully Integrated Environments
Given the broad range of services they must offer citizens, government CIOs often have to manage multiple systems that each have their own technology stack and database. Meanwhile, government employees must expend extra effort to navigate these siloed systems, which mirror the silos in government departments themselves.
As the systems age, maintenance costs increase. Although it would be nice to modernize everything in a legacy tech portfolio at once, most budgets will only support replacing one system at a time. Meanwhile, citizens will still expect a modern digital interface to these systems.
Simplifying Infrastructure
Building public infrastructure that allows better access to digital solutions will continue to be a challenge this year, and cloud is turning into one of the most powerful tools to do so, as, according to Gartner, 62% of Governments will invest in Cloud Platforms in 2023. Gartner also predicts that “migrating services to the cloud is among [the] primary innovation priorities that governments are focused on.”
Organizations have been using cloud platforms to simplify infrastructure, reducing the need for maintaining and managing their own infrastructure. As an example of this impact, a January 2021 survey showed that 70% of state and local government executives highlighted that cloud is their preferred environment for hosting citizen and mission data.
