Engineering the future of finance technology
New data technologies are no longer solely the preserve of business. Far from it — the digital agenda is an immediate and urgent priority for government organisations that recognise technology as one of the primary and most accessible means of improving citizen service and driving new efficiencies, while simultaneously enhancing accountability and transparency.
Many public and private entities have met the technology and data challenges of this decade that the pandemic ushered in. Governments were forced to digitise their processes by updating to digital correspondences, offering online services and implementing teleworking to sustain operations and services. This necessity enabled technology to accelerate at a rapid pace. The tech-driven future we highlighted in arrived sooner than anticipated.
In this new report, we continue to explore a predictably unpredictable future, using examples from leading public sector organisations.
Our 2014 survey found that an astounding 89% of public sector leaders identified technology adoption as the biggest area where improvement was needed to benefit citizens, but only 29% used technology to that effect. The report also concluded that providing easily accessible, relevant and timely information to support public services is critical for successful, sustainable government entities. Today, we’ve moved from adoption of technology systems often forced and accelerated by the pandemic to implementing and streamlining those systems with an enhanced cybersecurity focus.
The research described in the original report explored current and future local government practices in 48 countries. The findings showed that for governments to meet the demands of politicians, citizens, businesses, and other constituents within increasingly diverse urban communities, they must simultaneously address four key areas and meet the ongoing challenge of ‘doing more with less’. They must actively pursue the transformation of public services and enable the necessary technology to support this objective while responding to increasing public demand for government transparency. To meet these challenges, it was indicated that governments must also contend with the difficulty of recruiting, developing, and retaining talent in an increasingly competitive market.
Future of Finance: Government Series
The 2014 CGMA® report, Managing local government performance – Transparency, technology, talent and transformation, outlined a new role for finance in helping local authority leaders address key performance management challenges.
In this new series, we revisit key topic areas, generating new insights for government finance professionals.
This new report focuses on today’s technology drivers, such as data security, data manipulation, robotics and the like. With these developments come added cybersecurity risks (for example, data breaches). There are steps organisations can take in minimising these risks. Some of these prevention measures can be found in the AICPA GPAC Insight article, ‘What happens now? Preventing cybersecurity issues in the Public Sector’.2 Government entities that strategically address drivers and incorporate technological advances to improve communication, strategy, and performance can reap significant benefits for their employees, citizens, and other stakeholders. Here we consider in more detail recent and future developments in digitalisation3 and open data, and provide practical and futuristic guidance for finance professionals now that networks and security are vastly different in the new full-time remote and hybrid working environments.
_________________________________________________________________________________________2 Ross Baldwin and Grant Simmons, ‘What happens now? Preventing cybersecurity issues in the Public Sector’, 2022 Government Performance & Accountability Committee (GPAC) Insight article, AICPA & CIMA.3 Throughout this report, we use digitalisation to mean the use by entities of advanced digital technologies to do things better — see the ‘Digital Transformation’ section for further details.