A smart city is a city that engages and connects to its citizens. Intelligent living through AI is going to be the new norm, and the government should be ready to implement such technological advancements to satisfy the general public. Spending on Smart City initiatives is forecasted to reach US $203 billion globally by 2024, with smart grid, fixed visual surveillance, advanced public transit and intelligent traffic management as top use cases. Orchestrating a digital ecosystem to speed up the launch of digitized citizen-facing services, 30% of governments globally will double investments in data protection, data governance, and data sharing capabilities by 2024.
With the advent of smart identity management for public identification and security, IDC forecasted that in 2024, the worldwide spending on security-related products & services will grow to US $174.7 billion with a 5-year CAGR of 8.1%. The software spending part includes three important categories – endpoint security, identity and access management, and vulnerability management. By 2024, a truly global, portable, decentralized identity standard using blockchain technology will emerge in the market to address business, personal, social and societal, and identity-invisible use cases. This will greatly benefit organisations to reduce costs and operational risks by eliminating the need for replicated identity repositories and data.
Through embracing digitalisation, governments can provide services that can meet the evolving expectations of citizens and businesses, even in periods of tight budgets and increasing complex challenges. With the emergence of disruptive technologies, government can simplify complex processes, enabling them to create a frictionless system that deliver efficient services to the public based on real insights instead of statistical trends. A government that interacts to the public with no constraints on a wide variety of digital channels puts citizens first for a better and more integrated system. McKinsey estimates that government digitisation, in adopting disruptive technologies, could generate over US $1 trillion potential economic impact annually worldwide.
Reinforcing digital transformation in the government aims on one important goal: public satisfaction. Creating a strong government-citizen relationship through technology provides the public with secure and convenient access to government digital services. Gartner survey shows that cloud services, data analytics and infrastructure are the top tech priorities among government CIOs. Digital transformation revolves around data, public sector CIOs need to expand their data and analytics capabilities. This is made possible through digitalisation of all possible touch-points, which includes consolidating online-access platforms, creating citizen-business portals, and automating transactional processes. In addition, deployment of intelligent sensors with advanced predictive analytics in public places enable governments to understand public behaviour and increase the availability of open data to better serve the general populace.