The world around us continues to evolve with artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, 5G, cryptocurrencies and the Internet of Things (IoT), improving how we communicate and exchange information. Increased digitisation and the growing interconnectedness of people, organisations and machines is already having a profound impact on the world’s economies.
By Tony Bartlett, director: data centre compute solutions at Dell Technologies South Africa
Recognising this potential, government strategies today are emphasising the role of digital in accelerating economic diversification, promoting sustainability and ensuring citizen happiness.
Today, technology is driving significant transformation within the public sector, enabling the development of digital economies and the delivery of improved citizen services. Digital economies are characterised by the use of digital technologies to facilitate economic activities such as online transactions and the sharing of information. These economies also often feel the benefit of technology by increased competition, a focus on innovation and enhanced productivity.
According to Gartner, worldwide government IT spending is forecast to total $588,9-billion in 2023, an increase of 6,8% from 2022. In South Africa, the public service spent approximately R62 billion on digital technologies between 2018 and 2021.
In addition, R2,4-billion has been allocated to modernise information and communication technology over the next three years. Locally and internationally, this growth is being driven by the increasing adoption of cloud computing, big data analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) in the public sector.
Generate value through digital transformation
As government organisations continue their digital transformation journey, there are a handful of practical focus areas they must keep in mind to enable productive, outcome-driven collaborations:
* Bring greater agility to agency operations with flexible IT. Transform static IT into responsive, on-demand, robust IT services that can fuel your agency’s agenda while keeping administrative workloads small.
* Empower employees to succeed, anytime and anywhere. Technology users in government have always been a mixed population of mobile and office-based workers. Today, they need to be able to work productively from anywhere — agency offices, remote locations and in transit.
* Spur innovation by making better use of data assets. Purpose-designed data storage and processing can help you simplify and secure data management and translate information into innovations and decisions that benefit constituents.
* Augment cybersecurity across agencies, services, applications, devices and systems. In addition to using secure devices and infrastructures, you can deploy and integrate targeted solutions to safeguard user identities, data and systems, and to recover quickly from digital attacks.
* Build centres of knowledge and innovation. When we look at future skills development and building the workforce of the future, we need to understand that these areas allow us to unlock a lot of potential for the future growth of digital economies. New technologies can unlock new kinds of value and revenue generation. Thanks to automation, workers can spend time on more valuable, mission-critical work and less time on repetitive, automatable tasks.
One of the key benefits of technology in the public sector is the ability to deliver improved citizen services. For example, more countries across the EMEA region are now using technology to provide online access to government services such as renewing driver’s licences and paying taxes. This not only makes it easier for citizens to access services, but also reduces travel costs and commuting time to government offices.
There are strong examples of digital government such as:
* For citizens and entrepreneurs, digital access is continuously improving in South Africa, where online government services include driver’s licence test and renewal bookings, identity card and passport applications and renewals, and submission of tax returns.
* The South African Government has announced plans to provide high-speed Internet to every community by 2024, with free data for citizens in need.
Winning in the digital economy requires a combination of technical understanding, pioneering leadership, and a sense of vision and determination to encourage an ecosystem of innovation. Government leaders who engage with these possibilities today could be shaping the digital economies of tomorrow.
By placing ICT transformation programmes at the heart of their national plans and collaborating with the private sector, governments are leading the way in securing a viable future for their citizens while raising their national competitiveness on the global stage.
These digital transformation agendas represent countries’ efforts towards unlocking their potential to radically improve healthcare, education and public services, among others, all with a view to making a positive contribution to society and building the extraordinary future we will live in.