Civil Municipal Magazine - Dec 2023

16 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 4, ISSUE 12 agencies should focus on improving the developer experience by reducing barriers to productivity, eliminating bureaucratic tasks, and providing continuous learning opportunities,” the report says. The final two trends are managing cyber threats and misinformation and the development of technical wellness plans that, over time, work to progressively incorporate more modern technologies and techniques instead of upgrading systems piecemeal. The report ranks each trend based on the relevance to local government, and the ability of organizations to adopt it. “It turns out that increasingly powerful simulations of physical reality help inform how things are working,” Buchholz said about the use of digital twinning in the public sector. When designing buildings, for example, planners can run simulations to better understand how certain features function. Historically, local government has been slow to adapt in part because the public spector is expansive. Governments have a lot of technology, but a lot of it “was built to suit yesterday’s mission,” he continued. “What winds up happening is that, when people’s expectations evolve, it’s often hard to evolve the bulk of technology at speed to keep up with people’s expectations.” Developing technical wellness plans, which take a birds-eye view to entire ecosystems rather tahn considering specific tasks, is one way to meet the challenge. “A lot of organizations have allowed their systems to stagnate over time,” Buchholz said, noting that a lack of progress historically is a current impetus that’s pushing organizations to intentionally plan for future changes. The evolution of technology isn’t entirely problematic from an