In a recent article, McKinsey proposed a typology of four significant technology trends that will reshape the future of IT and business, each of which resonates in the public sector:
- Innovation at the edge – innovation driven by personal networks around the edge of organisations, enabled by acceleration in the use of hybrid or multicloud management technologies, tools and processes, massive improvements in network speeds and latency, user interactions driven by AI-driven speech, written word or algorithms and low-code platform growth.
- A perpetual learning culture – the proliferation of technology innovations will mean that technology literacy will become core to every role, requiring learning to be continuous and built at the level of individual skills that are deployed at the point of need.
- IT as a service – IT becomes the enabler of product innovation by serving platforms for small, interoperable blocks of code – microservices.
- Expanded trust boundaries – widespread adoption of innovations such as biometric identity verification on smartphones will generate a step change in public anxiety and trust in digital applications.
Our look ahead to 2023 finds much in common with this report, but some subtle differences. While our report does not attempt to give a definitive list of all the technologies that will be used in 2023 by public service organisations, some are implied or central to the digital priorities already listed.
However, six technologies stand out as being high priority for the coming year. In Figure 1, we map the intersection of these technologies onto the typology of trends identified by McKinsey:
