Sam Higgins* says the fallout from the pandemic, geopolitical tensions and climate-driven disasters mean Government workers must prepare themselves for continuing difficulties in the year ahead.
During the past two years of the global pandemic, the public sector has played a larger and more crucial role in people’s daily lives than at any time during this century.
As world leaders prepare to announce the end of the health emergency, Governments have begun to weigh a return to pre-pandemic, business-as-usual policies, programs, and service delivery.
However, deepening geopolitical tensions, increasing economic uncertainty, and more frequent climate-driven disasters mean societies are facing more, not fewer, systemic risks and crises.
To help business and society navigate this next great wave of global change, the public sector must gird itself for an uncertain future.
It must strengthen its talent pool, maintain trusted relationships with customers, and retain hard-won pandemic-era competencies and capacity.
Doing so means wrestling with unprecedented external pressures and internal challenges.
During the pandemic the public sector embraced anywhere work mostly as a temporary measure.
Now, 67 per cent of global public sector employees expect they’ll have to return to the office, according to Forrester’s Future Of Work Survey, 2022.
However, Government employees want flexible work arrangements and are willing to Agency-hop or simply jump to the private sector to find this flexibility.
In 2023, the public sector will have to do more to stem the tide of employee loss to the private sector, especially to companies with great employee experience programs and those that now offer non-monetary compensation and benefits that meet or exceed those of the public sector.
Historically, security leaders have emphasised the need for data confidentiality, but they are now facing a new battle over data integrity.
In a data integrity attack, malicious actors don’t steal or ransom data — they silently tamper with, corrupt, and manipulate the data on which insights-driven organisations depend.
In 2023, an insider attack on Government data integrity will result from employees’ growing disquiet with Government responses.
This will include international issues such as the war in Ukraine or domestic policies tied to social issues like reproductive rights or cost-of-living pressures.
The perpetrators will likely see themselves as modern-day Robin Hoods who alter data to benefit the vulnerable by increasing benefits to disadvantaged people.
However, the attackers could also pursue nefarious outcomes like manipulating data that informs justice, budget, or public policy decisions.
Our data shows that 38 per cent of Government workers say the person responsible for their organisation’s customer experience (CX) program reports to a Chief Customer Officer (CCO).
That’s good news, since CX transformation requires executive support and the budget that goes with it.
However, in 2022, few Government organisations with CCOs improved CX quality.
Some of these organisations even declined, despite the imprimatur of political leaders, such as the CX Executive Order in the United States.
The problem is that too few public sector CCOs use their clout to make the changes that matter most.
These include implementing journey-centric approaches and replacing archaic processes, legacy systems, and bureaucratic decision-making.
*Sam Higgins is the Principal Analyst at Forrester, a leading international research and advisory firm.
This article originally appeared on the Forrester Predictions 2023 website.
