EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Government agencies across the globe – whether they be state, local, central, or federal – face a digital transformation imperative. Increasingly sophisticated digital services provided by the private sector have increased citizen expectations of government. For many agencies, legacy IT stacks and inflexible budgetary requirements stand in the way of meeting these expectations. Furthermore, the convergence of multiple industry-disrupting “mega-trends,” including cloud, IoT, mobile, and big data, has led to an explosion of connectivity endpoints, complicating the path toward digital government.
For government IT teams to keep pace with citizen expectations, they must increase IT agility without compromising security. We propose that an architectural approach centered around APIs and microservices should be used to unlock monolithic legacy systems where core data and services are siloed. Doing so can increase the speed of IT project delivery, leading to more efficient, cost-effective, responsive government. Organizations considering such an approach should ensure that the underlying integration and API lifecycle management technologies they use to implement such a strategy can deployed in the cloud alongside modern technologies, and that they meet government security and compliance requirements (e.g. FedRAMP).