Cloud office applications have become mainstream in government

The penetration of cloud-based office applications has passed the 50 percent mark across organisations and adoption among government agencies in particular is growing strongly, according to research firm Gartner.

Government agencies are moving rapidly to adopt cloud-office platforms because of the desire to consolidate collaboration environments, reduce costs, redeploy IT staff, drive simplicity and provide more functionality to users more quickly. Because of these cloud applications, the introduction of AI, mobile collaboration, collaborative content authoring and workstream collaboration are becoming part of the mainstream fast.

Cloud services especially designed for government will have a transformational business impact in less than two years, says Gartner. “Government agencies acknowledge that public cloud is secure, and some are even making plans to adopt public cloud across protected, secret domains. But the majority remain in private clouds,” said Neville Cannon, senior research director at Gartner. “In addition, more countries continue to adopt cloud-first policies — Brazil and Colombia are the latest, while Kuwait is currently developing its own.”

DGTPs

Digital government technology platforms (DGTPs) will have a transformational impact on businesses in the next two to five years. “Digital technology platforms are emerging across government agencies as they allow governments to retire legacy systems and infrastructure and therefore achieve greater economies of scale,” said Alia Mendonsa, senior research director at Gartner. “They also provide secure, automated citizen-centric digital government services for all types of services such as appointments, payments and eligibility for benefits.”

Gartner analysts said that DGTPs will continue penetration across governments as they offer enterprise solutions that support development of sustainable and scalable digital government services. Current examples include the Australian Government’s Digital Marketplace, where government agencies can do business with sellers of digital services, and The State of Ohio’s InnovateOhio platform, which provides services and capabilities that enable state agencies to become more customer-centric and data-driven.