If federal agency leaders learned anything last year when the COVID-19 pandemic turned the world on its ear, it was this: Technology is vital to the mission.

Of course, many understood this before 2020, as they witnessed cloud computing, artificial intelligence, automation, and other advancements rapidly re-modeling the world around us. But the almost overnight transformation that we all experienced in the spring of 2020 brought home just how integral technology is to our lives, our businesses, our ability to get things done, and our ability to be resilient in the face of crises.

As Dana Deasy, Defense Department CIO, told reporters in April 2020, “We are truly in unprecedented times in our nation. The national emergency due to the coronavirus, COVID-19, global pandemic has no doubt brought new changes to the ways Americans go about their daily jobs. Specifically, the way we work has changed dramatically within the last month.”

No wonder, then, that swift and sweeping technology modernization initiatives took center stage as the federal government adopted a wartime footing in response to the pandemic. By late April 2020, federal agencies had spent $1.1 billion on IT goods and services to address challenges brought on by COVID-19, according to one analysis. Priorities were hardware and network modernization to support newly remote workforces, cloud services, tele-health capabilities, data management and analytics, cybersecurity, and other needs.

To carry the lessons of 2020 forward, federal agencies need to drum the word impossible out of their vocabularies and work together to solve big challenges. They must take the lessons of the past year to heart and hardwire their organizations and mindsets to be ready and adaptable for continuous change and resilient to whatever comes their way. This requires federal agencies to build the right innovation environments and cultures and remove remaining organizational barriers that divide technology from the mission so they are both moving forward as one.

This is a challenge that demands a new kind of leadership. Agency leaders can no longer afford to be merely business or mission leaders — they must also be technology leaders, fully versed on how technology intersects with and advances their mission ambitions. A digital-first approach must be fostered by the entire C-suite and manifested across all areas of the organization. This is how agencies can pivot from being reactive to proactive to predictive, how they can thrive in an era of unprecedented variability and complexity, and how they remove blind spots as they chart a bold course ahead.

As the saying goes: The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Prioritizing technology is essential to ensuring the enterprise doesn’t fall behind. However, true leadership will emerge from the embrace of radically different mindsets and models.

The world has been beset by sweeping change and demands leadership that thinks boldly in response. Thriving in this moment will require ambitious leaders not content to rehabilitate what was, but who are willing to upend convention and wield their vision for the future. Leaders have spent decades building systems — workforces, supply chains, technology infrastructures, operating and business models — that were suitable for an era when change happened slowly and expectedly. But today, success will come to those with the audacity to reimagine it all.

In the last year, enterprises were forced to confront deep-seated assumptions about how fast the organization can pivot, and where or how work gets done. Before the pandemic, if you asked Defense Department executives how long it would take to deploy a new office collaboration platform across the department, few if any would have said it would be possible in less than a year. But we found out that with the right level of priority and leadership, anything is possible.

This journey of reinvention has only just begun. The pandemic radically accelerated changes that agencies knew were coming but didn’t expect to see so soon. While it will be tempting for agencies to retreat to what they know, 2020 brought the need for a different path forward into clear focus. If federal agencies continue to have a clear-eyed perspective and sharp focus on their expedited digital transformations, reimagining everything from their people, to data, architectures, and ecosystems, they can emerge as leaders.

In our Federal Technology Vision 2021 report, we see how many federal agencies are beginning to imagine and build their digital future. They understand the importance of architecting for the future and recognizing that business and technology strategies are increasingly indistinguishable. Architecture has never mattered more — and the options available have never been so vast. But getting this piece right is critical, as the technology choices that agencies make today will determine their possibilities and constraints far into the future.

As leaders thread technology through all aspects of the business, the valuable troves of data generated are being used to build massive networks of intelligent digital twins. This mirrored world that these next-generation twins create is fueling change by unlocking the value of data and allowing enterprises to simulate, predict, and automate by seamlessly bridging the divide between digital and physical.

Government enterprises must also ensure their people are empowered to become drivers of change — an outcome achievable through technology democratization, which is making powerful technology capabilities accessible without the need for specialized skills. Many agencies are already igniting grassroots innovation by equipping all employees with the tools and skills to build technology solutions at the point of need.

The Federal Technology Vision identifies five key trends that federal agencies must address to capitalize on this moment of truth over the next three years to lead in the post-pandemic world:

Technology is advancing so rapidly, it’s hard to keep up — even for IT leaders!

But increasingly, we live in a world where every organizational leader needs to be a technologist because technology is driving the rapid transformations we see occurring all around us. Technology is so integral to mission success today that federal agency leaders no longer have the luxury to leave the technology to the IT folks. They need to spend time and energy understanding what technology is here, what’s coming around the corner, and what the impacts are.

The problem is that there is a lot of noise out there about technology, and it’s really hard to know where to focus. The Accenture Federal Technology Vision is our attempt to help federal leaders separate the noise from the signal by providing extensive research and real-world examples of what’s happening globally as well as within the federal sector around today’s technologies.

For over twenty years, the Accenture Technology Vison has identified the most important emerging technology trends impacting businesses, governments, and society over the next three years. What sets it apart is its focus on the underlying forces behind each trend as well as the frank advice it offers on how enterprises should respond. The Accenture Technology Vison is produced by Accenture Labs and Accenture Research with input from over one hundred Accenture leaders and more than two dozen external experts. It also incorporates the findings of a global survey of over 6,000 enterprise leaders.

This year’s global report, Leaders Wanted, examines how the world responded to the unprecedented stresses and challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic. What we learned is that many enterprises are far more agile than they thought. Their challenge going forward is accelerating their digital transformation to meet the new expectations left in the pandemic’s wake.

The Accenture Federal Technology Vision 2021 applies these trends to the unique demands and challenges facing the U.S. federal government. It builds upon insight from more than 50 Accenture Federal Services experts as well as survey data from two hundred federal program, business and IT leaders.