As we turn the page on 2013, we look forward to a new year and new opportunities for innovation and growth in the government contracting community. This past year we experienced budget sequestration, a 16-day-long government shutdown, and a perpetually increasing focus on cyber security and healthcare IT.
WashingtonExec reached out to those most knowledgeable and experienced individuals in the federal contracting space. We asked executives in and around the beltway for insight regarding where they see the government contracting community headed in 2014. Topics discussed include M&A activity, cloud computing, healthcare IT, defense, mobility, and more.
J.R. Reagan, Principal at Deloitte & Touche LLP and leader of the Deloitte Highly Immersive Visual Environment (HIVE):
Collaboration between the public, private, and non-profit sectors should rise to an unprecedented level in 2014 and beyond as data sharing and analysis become ever more critical to meeting constituents’ needs and satisfying consumer demands. Already, state and local governments use data to predict and resolve problems — spotting areas of rising crime, for instance, and increasing police patrols. As tools for storing and accessing data, such as cloud systems, grow in their capacities and systems for analysis become more sophisticated and simpler to use, all three sectors will rely on big data to help them better serve their constituencies.
In health care, physicians, hospitals, insurance providers, non-profit health organizations, pharmaceutical companies, researchers, and government agencies may soon be able to access and analyze information helpful to diagnosing illnesses, determining the best courses of treatment, and predicting trends such as epidemics, crucial to protecting public health.
Federal agencies could see an increased emphasis on cyber security. Protecting sensitive information will be paramount, as well as a shift to continuous monitoring from the traditional certification & accreditation process. Again, as data collection, storage (via cloud), and analytics improve, so should the ability to predict and counteract threats. Government IT managers will need the knowledge and skills to use cloud services to apply these tools, and data scientists, analyzing the information, may outnumber IT professionals at many sites.
Mobility should be more important than ever, especially as new types of mobile devices emerge on the market. Citizens will expect mobile access to government services such as crime reporting, disaster notifications, and customer service. More state and local governments will hire chief digital officers to meet these demands.