Spending by national, federal and local governments worldwide on technology products and services is forecast to decline 1.8 percent from $439 billion to $431 billion in 2015, growing to $475.5 billion by 2019.
These and other insights are from the press release Gartner published to a worldwide audience on June 3, 2015 titled Gartner Highlights Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for Government. The forecasts and findings of this study will also revolutionize how governments manage compliance, quality management, manufacturing and long-term services. The integrative aspects of Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) for government contractors and the continual improvement these systems need to make are reflected in these top ten trends as well.
The top 10 strategic technology trends for government include the following:
1) Digital Workplace – CIOs who can successfully orchestrate social, mobile, cloud and analytics to deliver greater information accessibility, accuracy and insight will revolutionize government IT performance. CIO business strategists will coordinate the use of these technologies to reduce resistance to change and improve change management results in government bureaucracies known for their lack of new process and technology adoption.
2) Multichannel Citizen Engagement – Government agencies should identify and use customer-centric metrics for single-channel and cross-channel processes in order to monitor channel effectiveness and multichannel dynamics. Agencies attaining best practices will establish additional key performance indicators or data requirements needed for ongoing improvements and optimization.
3) Open Any Data – Using open data and analytics to discover complex interdependencies among agency programs or government vertical industries including complex manufacturing, to improve government performance, or to gain insight into citizen preferences, is a dominant trend Gartner expects to accelerate within the next three years. This aligns well with the continual growth of manufacturing intelligence in complex manufacturing, specifically aerospace and defense.
4) Citizen e-ID – The global proliferation of analytics, mobile apps cloud computing and social media is speeding up the adoption of citizen e-ID programs and gaining renewed interest from governments to support political mandates. This trend has strong trends for global manufacturing as well, with e-ID programs now being commonplace across many of the world’s leading aerospace and defense companies.
5) Edge Analytics – Breaking down the traditional silo barriers between transactional and analytics systems is going to enable next-generation applications, including those dedicated to manufacturing, to stream data directly to intelligent business operations systems. Edge analytics will revolutionize manufacturing, compliance and quality management processes and systems within the next five years as well. The bottom line is that when any government contractor can dynamically execute business processes, anticipating and planning for contingencies using real-time analytics, they will be able to reduce costly mistakes by improving quality.
6) Scalable Interoperability – When procuring new IT systems or services, include requirements to conform to accredited or “best available” interoperability frameworks, open standards and data formats, such as NIEM (National Information Exchange Model), HL7 FHIR (Health Level Seven Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) or XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is the best approach. This is critically important for managing complex contactor and subcontractor manufacturing projects, where interoperability standards need to be able to scale across global supply and value chains.
7) Digital Government Platforms – Defining a “one platform provider and multiple software vendors” approach in which one platform-as-a-service vendor provides technical, data and business services, such as a server storage, networking, virtualization, middleware, database management, analytics or workflow provides scalability over the long term. Having a digital government platform capable of scaling across multiple contractor locations is invaluable in assuring compliance and quality management across large-scale aerospace and defense manufacturing projects.
8) Internet of Things – The Internet of Things (IoT) needs to be approached strategically, evaluating how a growing base of intelligent objects and equipment can be combined with traditional Internet and IT systems to support breakthrough innovations in operational performance. There are a myriad of advantages for manufacturers as well by taking this approach. Combining manufacturing and government efforts can deliver significant improvements in delivery times and overall project performance.
9) Web-Scale IT – Web-scale IT is the result of the demand to create global-class cloud services to address the increasingly complex client environment, using automation and other software-defined and policy-based models to drive speed and agility. For manufacturing strategies to scale globally, specifically the role of supplier quality management, Web –Scale IT must be in place.
10) Hybrid Cloud (and IT) – Design private cloud services with future public cloud integration and interoperability in mind, including hybrid cloud computing. Establish requirements for vendors to support open, standard northbound APIs in order to maximize flexibility and minimize lock-in. The implications of this trend in complex manufacturing, specifically aerospace and defense projects, is clear.
