Are Governments Ready for Digital Transformation?

The Hype Cycle™ is a well-established graphical tool used to represent the trigger, adoption, maturity and application of a specific technology and so characterise the complete life cycle of that technology’s adoption.

The Hype Cycle was developed by US advisory and IT firm Gartner, who have applied the methodology to explore digital government technology over the past few years. In the recently released Hype Cycle™ for Digital Government Technology, 2021 survey we find several technologies that deploy digital identity prominently featured.

The five phases used to build a picture of a technology’s growth in the Hype Cycle are:

1. Technology trigger: Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity.

2. Peak of Inflated Expectations: Early publicity produces a number of success stories—often accompanied by scores of failures.

3. Trough of Disillusionment: Interest in the technology begins to fade as trials fail to deliver.

4. Slope of Enlightenment: More instances of how the technology can benefit companies and society start to crystallise and become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation products appear from technology providers.

5. Plateau of Productivity: Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology’s broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off.

Whilst the shape of the Hype Cycle remains constant irrespective of the technology under investigation, reviewing a particular application of a technology’s position on the Hype Cycle over time gives an assessment of its particular development under the complete umbrella of the technology’s life cycle.

For instance, in the 2019 version of the Digital Government Technology Hype Cycle, ‘chatbots’, or conversational artificial intelligence interfaces, were sitting at the top of the ‘peak of inflated expectations’. In the 2021 version of the same technology Hype Cycle, chatbots are at the bottom of the ‘trough of disillusionment’ – with a prediction that, assuming the application travels smoothly through the ‘slope of enlightenment’, it will reach the ‘plateau of productivity’ within two years.

In their Hype Cycle for Digital Government Technology, 2021 survey, Gartner has identified 32 technology areas to watch out for in driving more digital government services. According to Gartner ‘60% of governments will have tripled citizen digital services by 2023, but fewer than 25% will be integrated across organisational silos’.

Several topics that have featured widely this year in ID & Secure News such as ‘Health passes’, ‘Identity wallets for citizens’, ‘Decentralised identity’ and ‘Document-centric identity proofing in government’ are featured prominently at various stages on the Hype Cycle for Digital Government Technology, 2021 survey.

You can download a complimentary copy of the Gartner research to learn more about their recommendations on citizen-focused digital identity technologies and other supporting technologies here.