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It’s hard to overstate the impact of COVID-19 on our lives over the past year and a half. Work, school, doctor’s visits, shopping, travel, family reunions and entertainment have all been redesigned and redesigned.
The pandemic has also accelerated our collective recognition that every business, government agency, and organization is truly a technology organization now. Just about anything that could be made possible by technology, even collaboration itself, is now.
So what did we learn from this experience? And where do these lessons take us?
New research from Accenture Federal Services suggests that many leaders in the federal space see this period as a clear inflection point. Fifty-seven percent of federal executives say the pace of their organization’s digital transformation is accelerating; 97% say the pandemic has created an unprecedented stress test for their organization; and 91% say their organization is innovating as a matter of urgency.
These survey results and other information highlighted in our latest annual report Federal technological vision report corroborates what many of us already intuitively feel. Leaders of federal agencies are feeling the pressure of this fast-paced world and are fighting to keep pace.
Here are five trends we’ve discovered that agency executives should keep in mind as they chart their way and prepare for other unexpected disruptions:
Stack strategically
Modernization cannot be seen as a simple migration of workloads from legacy platforms to the cloud. Agencies will need to think about technology differently by making their business and technology strategies inseparable, if not indistinguishable. In order to do this, the agency’s technology architects can no longer be “supporting actors” – they will increasingly have to be “leading actors” from a strategic point of view. This is because today’s technology is no longer a one-size-fits-all proposition. The ever-growing abundance of ‘as a service’ solutions, improvements in technology standards, AI models, as well as cloud services and deployment options allow agencies to design and assemble stacks of capabilities technologies tailored to their unique business missions and needs. .
Agencies will need to think about the long-term impact that these choices can have, either by limiting them or by propelling them into the future. Today, these decisions tend to be managed by the CIO and other agency IT managers. But to be successful, the agency’s mission and business leaders will also need to take an active role in learning how emerging technologies can advance the agency’s mission and business operations and help guide related decisions.
A mirrored world
Organizations can now create digital twins that use real-world data to replicate the performance of complex living systems in a virtual environment to identify potential conflict points, points of failure, early indicators of bottlenecks or poor performance, vulnerabilities and inefficiencies. This is a powerful capability that organizations will increasingly leverage to deliver improved mission performance and end user services.
Many federal agencies, including the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, branches of military service, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Department of Homeland Security, are using or exploring digital twin technologies to support enterprise decision making for a wide range of use cases.
For example, digital twins can help with asset optimization, risk awareness and mitigation, productivity improvement, troubleshooting and diagnostics, and even predictive maintenance and analytics. Naval Sea Systems Command uses them today to improve the efficiency and productivity of its shipyards, while many healthcare-focused agencies are actively exploring how digital twins can improve the diagnosis and treatment of patients.
me technologist
Technology is becoming more and more user-friendly and intuitive. We’re seeing federal employees of all stripes – not just IT specialists – using a wide variety of emerging, mostly cloud-based tools to build custom dashboards, run data analytics, launch low-code apps. or without code, and even introduce automation and AI. in their workflows. We’re seeing federal employees, for example, deploying robotic process automation (RPA) bots to automate the most routine and time-consuming tasks of their jobs to free them up to do higher-value work.
As this trend sets in, we will see more and more federal employees rely on their mission knowledge to select the appropriate technologies and tools to meet the needs themselves. This trend will allow employees to operate as IT specialists regardless of their job classification and allow them to take advantage of IT-approved self-service tools and solutions.
This trend has several key implications. For example, IT departments will no longer be the gatekeepers to everything IT matters. They must evolve towards a role of collaborator and facilitator with the mission and the commercial aspects of the agency. In addition, agencies will be responsible for developing greater digital fluidity throughout the company through training programs that allow employees to better take advantage of available, secure, do-it-yourself technology tools.
Anywhere anywhere
When the pandemic hit, businesses and government agencies sent employees to work from home and doubled down on technology to keep organizations productive. In fact, 79% of federal executives surveyed agreed that their organization’s employees had just experienced the biggest and fastest human behavior change in their history. It is increasingly clear that we are heading into a new future where work can be done anywhere and anywhere. It’s not just technology that is changing; they are entire staff.
Today’s Bring Your Own Environment (BYOE) paradigm, putting entire environments to work, is sure to survive the pandemic, meaning organization leaders will need to re-evaluate the size and goals of the physical office. Going forward, the organizations that succeed will be those that put the energy into rethinking their workforce model in these times of change.
From me to us
Federal leaders learned during the pandemic that the capacities of their own agencies were only expanding so far. Optimal business and mission results require the combined capabilities and expertise of multiple organizations working collaboratively on a basis of trust. Multi-stakeholder systems are emerging in many business sectors; but many federal agencies are also exploring them as a way to improve efficiency, transparency, accountability, security, interoperability, and trust in their transactions and processes.
What these trends all have in common is that they will allow organizations to be more resilient and better positioned for a future defined by a rapid pace of disruption. By strategically stacking, for example, federal agencies can pre-position and optimize their ability to create unique business and mission departments. With digital twins, agencies can model an endless array of scenarios to better prepare for a multitude of future possibilities. And by operating within a larger ecosystem of trusted partners, agencies can apply a wider range of expertise and capabilities to the challenges they face.
Federal leaders must keep technology at the forefront as they position themselves for the future and move from a reactive to a proactive posture. COVID-19 certainly won’t be the last major disruption we’ll see – consider, for example, how many Americans were personally affected by the recent cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline in the eastern United States
But it illustrates how federal agencies must take action now to become masters of change in order to succeed in their mission.
Kyle Michl is the director of innovation at Federal Services Accenture.
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