Carol Collins
A Deloitte study shares “digital pivots,” or the array of assets and capabilities that government agencies can develop to further strengthen digital transformation considering how the COVID-19 pandemic underscored the need for organizations to become truly digital.
In a Deloitte piece The Wall Street Journal published Wednesday, the company said the assessment was made after it conducted a survey among 800 government officials in May and found that 80 percent of the respondents believed their agency’s digital initiatives “haven’t gone far enough” amid the global health crisis.
Almost 75 percent of surveyed officials also responded that the digital transformation of their respective governments was spurred by the pandemic.
“Although they made progress, governments became wired but not transformed. Too many still focused mostly on digitizing front-end services while postponing the tougher issues of fundamentally reengineering operations, processes and systems,” the content reads.
The digital pivots include data mastery, where a seamless flow of structure and unstructured data must be built to allow interoperability within agencies, and open talent network that covers strategies to hire digitally savvy employees and upskilling the workforce.
Innovation and new business models are also part of the digital pivots. The report noted that the convergence of artificial intelligence, cloud and blockchain technologies will open more opportunities for the government to provide innovative services to the citizens.
“Many government organizations intensified their digital transformation efforts in response to needs that surfaced or grew more urgent during COVID-19… As organizations invest in their digital futures, they can apply lessons learned over the past 18 months to advance strategically—pushing well beyond ‘doing’ digital initiatives to ‘being’ digital through and through,” wrote Deloitte’s William Eggers, Pankaj Kamleshkumar Kishnani, Jason Manstof and Jean Barroca.
