Public Sector Renews Focus on Employee and Citizen Digital Experiences

Learn more about Riverbed

Government agencies are transforming to improve the digital experience for employees and citizens, allowing them to achieve key goals, including unleashing staff productivity, recruiting and retaining talent in the public sector, and delivering on the mission, according to the Global Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Survey from Riverbed.

This transformation is also proving critical in overcoming the sector's many challenges, including the acceleration of hybrid work and a skills shortage as the workplace and workforce shift at an unprecedented pace.

Evolution at the Speed of Today's Employees

Every industry is facing a talent shortage, and the public sector is no exception. As longer-standing staff members retire, a new generation of digitally native Millennial and Gen Z workers enter with high expectations of their technology and digital experience. In fact, 86% of the public sector leaders surveyed believe they'll need to provide more advanced digital experiences as a fresh generation of employees enter the workforce.

New investment areas include unified observability platforms, which can deliver exceptional DEX by providing visibility, AI and actionable insight into entire infrastructures; 74% of IT respondents in government believe unified observability with greater automation can help close the skills gap.

Additionally, new investments are expected to support the hybrid workforce, as 49% of public sector employees operate in a hybrid model, and 92% of public sector leaders surveyed say hybrid working enhances their ability to recruit talent and remain competitive in the future. As a result, 83% of public sector leaders who responded to the survey plan to invest in technology over the next 12-18 months to support this hybrid workforce.

Enhanced digital experiences aren't simply considered a nice-to-have either. The survey showed that 58% of leaders in the public sector believe there would be a disruptive or reputational impact on their organization if the DEX needs of younger generations aren't met, while 63% agree that these employees would consider leaving the government organization if they didn't enjoy seamless digital experiences.

The Role of the Public Sector CIO is Shifting

As CIOs are consulted on significant strategic decisions that affect recruitment and productivity, they're expected to adopt a more prominent role within the leadership team.

81% of public sector decision-makers surveyed acknowledge the increasing relevance of IT within their organization's leadership team. In addition, 89% of the respondents agree that IT is more responsible for driving innovation now than it was three years ago. In effect, the pressure is on IT and its leaders to make smart investments and implement technologies that will support the cause and mission rather than adding extra complexity.

Decision-Makers Express a Heightened Interest in AI and Cloud

Separate research on government digitization from Deloitte says that the ultimate aim of governments must be from "doing" digital to "being" digital, which means "the human experience is elevated. Human-centered design and advanced technologies like AI, cyber, and cloud are used to radically improve service delivery by transforming government operating models."

McKinsey agrees, stating that "by digitizing processes and making organizational changes, governments can enhance services, save money, and improve citizens quality of life", and the Global Government Forum names digital transformation as one of the top four priorities for 2024.

This aligns with Riverbed's findings, as 80% of public sector leaders surveyed are planning to accelerate digital experience adoption and implementation.

Additionally, the survey found that the cloud (44%), AI (38%), and automation (33%) will become mission-critical priorities over the next 18 months. Unified observability uniquely fuses all these technologies while providing holistic visibility across physical and virtual environments, plus additional productivity-boosting functionality through AI and automation.

88% of the leaders surveyed agree that unified observability is important (45% critically important) to deliver DEX, and 87% say there must be greater investment in unified observability solutions that provide actionable insights for better employee and customer digital experience.

Methodology: The Riverbed Global Digital Employee Experience Survey 2023 polled 1,800 global IT decision makers (ITDMs) and business decision makers (BDMs) across 10 countries and seven industries, including 320 public sector leaders. The survey was conducted by Sapio Research in May 2023 to explore generational expectations, hybrid work, the evolving role of IT, and challenges and strategies to delivering an exceptional DEX.

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Public Sector Renews Focus on Employee and Citizen Digital Experiences

Learn more about Riverbed

Government agencies are transforming to improve the digital experience for employees and citizens, allowing them to achieve key goals, including unleashing staff productivity, recruiting and retaining talent in the public sector, and delivering on the mission, according to the Global Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Survey from Riverbed.

This transformation is also proving critical in overcoming the sector's many challenges, including the acceleration of hybrid work and a skills shortage as the workplace and workforce shift at an unprecedented pace.

Evolution at the Speed of Today's Employees

Every industry is facing a talent shortage, and the public sector is no exception. As longer-standing staff members retire, a new generation of digitally native Millennial and Gen Z workers enter with high expectations of their technology and digital experience. In fact, 86% of the public sector leaders surveyed believe they'll need to provide more advanced digital experiences as a fresh generation of employees enter the workforce.

New investment areas include unified observability platforms, which can deliver exceptional DEX by providing visibility, AI and actionable insight into entire infrastructures; 74% of IT respondents in government believe unified observability with greater automation can help close the skills gap.

Additionally, new investments are expected to support the hybrid workforce, as 49% of public sector employees operate in a hybrid model, and 92% of public sector leaders surveyed say hybrid working enhances their ability to recruit talent and remain competitive in the future. As a result, 83% of public sector leaders who responded to the survey plan to invest in technology over the next 12-18 months to support this hybrid workforce.

Enhanced digital experiences aren't simply considered a nice-to-have either. The survey showed that 58% of leaders in the public sector believe there would be a disruptive or reputational impact on their organization if the DEX needs of younger generations aren't met, while 63% agree that these employees would consider leaving the government organization if they didn't enjoy seamless digital experiences.

The Role of the Public Sector CIO is Shifting

As CIOs are consulted on significant strategic decisions that affect recruitment and productivity, they're expected to adopt a more prominent role within the leadership team.

81% of public sector decision-makers surveyed acknowledge the increasing relevance of IT within their organization's leadership team. In addition, 89% of the respondents agree that IT is more responsible for driving innovation now than it was three years ago. In effect, the pressure is on IT and its leaders to make smart investments and implement technologies that will support the cause and mission rather than adding extra complexity.

Decision-Makers Express a Heightened Interest in AI and Cloud

Separate research on government digitization from Deloitte says that the ultimate aim of governments must be from "doing" digital to "being" digital, which means "the human experience is elevated. Human-centered design and advanced technologies like AI, cyber, and cloud are used to radically improve service delivery by transforming government operating models."

McKinsey agrees, stating that "by digitizing processes and making organizational changes, governments can enhance services, save money, and improve citizens quality of life", and the Global Government Forum names digital transformation as one of the top four priorities for 2024.

This aligns with Riverbed's findings, as 80% of public sector leaders surveyed are planning to accelerate digital experience adoption and implementation.

Additionally, the survey found that the cloud (44%), AI (38%), and automation (33%) will become mission-critical priorities over the next 18 months. Unified observability uniquely fuses all these technologies while providing holistic visibility across physical and virtual environments, plus additional productivity-boosting functionality through AI and automation.

88% of the leaders surveyed agree that unified observability is important (45% critically important) to deliver DEX, and 87% say there must be greater investment in unified observability solutions that provide actionable insights for better employee and customer digital experience.

Methodology: The Riverbed Global Digital Employee Experience Survey 2023 polled 1,800 global IT decision makers (ITDMs) and business decision makers (BDMs) across 10 countries and seven industries, including 320 public sector leaders. The survey was conducted by Sapio Research in May 2023 to explore generational expectations, hybrid work, the evolving role of IT, and challenges and strategies to delivering an exceptional DEX.

Related Links

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The Latest

How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Nine in Ten Enterprises Plan Cloud Data Repatriation amid Rising Cloud Costs and Data Sovereignty Mandates

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Why ITOps Need Right-Sized AI, Not Bigger Models

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

The End of Reactive DevOps: AI-Driven Observability for Zero-Defect Digital Systems

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

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Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

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