A digital government perspective

Accenture Technology Vision 2015Delivering Public Service for the Future

In addition to presenting the five top trends, this year’s Accenture Technology Vision included a survey of 2,000 business and industry executives, including senior public service leaders, across nine countries. The goals: to understand their perspectives on key technology challenges they face and to identify their priority investments over the next few years. The findings demonstrate that public service organizations are tuned in to these disruptive trends, and they are making progress toward more digital governments.

INTRODUCTION

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Here, we provide an overview of the five trends, explain what they mean for aspiring digital governments, and share key findings of the global survey.

The Accenture Technology Vision 2015 highlights five trends that are reshaping industries and changing the way people live and work around the globe. The trends foreshadow important shifts and opportunities to improve public service performance and citizen satisfaction with government services. They point to government’s special role in shaping and enabling the commercial digital economy with infrastructure investment, digital-friendly policy and public/private partnerships that stimulate innovation. Ultimately, they reinforce the idea that very soon, every government will need to become a digital government.

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TREND 1

Internet of Me

The Internet of Me is changing the way people around the world interact through technology, placing the individual at the center of every digital experience.

Whether checking bank accounts, listening to music or monitoring our health, we now expect intuitive, at-our-fingertips digital experiences that reflect our preferences and address our needs. Such services o�er obvious benefits to consumers, but they can also provide a powerful channel through which service providers can influence consumer behavior.

The push for consumer-centric digital experiences is both raising the bar and fueling opportunities for digital government. When well executed, a seamless digital experience can lead to more than just satisfied citizens. It also can help government encourage positive behaviors such as greater voluntary tax compliance.

As digital becomes even more embedded, we expect radical shifts in the way people live and work. Consider, for example, the ongoing shift from supporting “health and welfare” to emphasizing “well-being.” Digital technologies can be used to provide personalized support toward healthier lifestyles, enhancing individuals’ personal growth and their contributions to the community.

That kind of personalized digital experience requires much more than a refreshed portal. Digital governments must know the needs, motivations, preferences and pain points of their “customers.” They also must own and shape the entire “customer” experience. Ultimately, providing a personalized experience requires digital governments to achieve a higher level of sophistication at every level and in every aspect of their operations—and to apply that standard consistently across thousands of citizen touch points.

Creating simpler, citizen- centric registration: Spanish social protection agency

For years, registering for social protection programs in Spain was like piecing together a puzzle—one in which the pieces seemed to change in the middle of the exercise. Though

ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY V IS ION 2015DEL IVER ING PUBL IC SERV ICE FOR THE FUTURE

To date, more than half of public service organizations (53 percent) are already seeing a positive return on their personalization investments.

Yet obstacles remain. In Accenture’s survey, public service leaders cited a number of key barriers to personalization: security (79 percent), customer privacy/trust (76 percent), lack of skilled workers (69 percent) and technology immaturity (62 percent).66%

A personalized citizen experience is a top-three priority for two out of three public service leaders.

frustrating for all registrants, the complexity created even higher barriers for migrants, the elderly and other at-risk segments of the population. The agency turned to Accenture for fresh thinking—and new digital ways of making the registration experience easier. Accenture formed a diverse team of strategists, designers and even an anthropologist to study the current process and outline specific challenges. From there, the team used human-centered design to produce a prototype of a new, digital registration service. With the individual’s needs at the core of its design, the digital registration service brings together all of the relevant puzzle pieces—no matter which department or agency “owns” them. It also uses friendly language and makes it easy for registrants to track where they stand in the process. In other words, it replaces a complex, government-centered process with an experience that could be described as “registration of me.”

The agency has embraced the new, digital approach as a fresh way to connect with citizens, build citizen trust and reduce the complexity of public management. And, it aims to replicate this success with other processes and stakeholders.

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TREND 2

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Outcome Economy

A growing collection of connected devices are changing the way we live and work. As objects come online, they enable new services. For example, sporting goods companies now promote fitness services enabled by personal wellness devices that capture and share exercise data. This is only the beginning of an explosion of new devices and new ideas fueling an Outcome Economy.

Sensors, cameras, household appliances and vehicles are among the myriad of things now connected to the Internet. For each connection, there is the potential for new services and better decisions on everything from how to get to work to where to go for dinner. This Internet of Things will enable organizations to o�er enhanced services, such as remote vehicle maintenance, property management and personal health management.

Digital devices will tie together businesses, governments and individuals from every industry of the world. In time, this will transform the way governments engage with citizens and deliver outcomes. Smart parking systems—which help drivers more quickly locate available spots—provide an early example of connected devices supporting an outcome-focused approach in the public realm. Likewise, connected and intelligent cameras and sensors can help improve public safety outcomes by providing o�cers with real-time situational data, such as gunshot detection and alerts of suspicious behavior.

The ultimate opportunity is for individuals to personalize their environments and, thus, their ability to address their own unique needs. Yet, the more specific opportunities of digital devices are only just beginning to be understood, and we have a long way to go as the digital revolution continues.

Only 26 percent of public service organizations are currently using sensor data to monitor and react to situations and anticipate issues. Just 9 percent reported using sensor data today to interact with the world, and only 19 percent indicate plans of doing so in the next three years—suggesting significant opportunity to expand use of intelligent hardware.

of public service leaders agree that with more intelligent hardware and deployed sensors and devices,

organizations will increasingly shift from selling products or services to selling outcomes.

84%

Platform (R)evolution

The Platform (R)evolution reflects how digital platforms that facilitate exchange, aggregation and analysis of data are becoming the tools of choice for building the next generation of products and services. A precipitous drop in the cost of data storage and computing power is enabling a level of data sharing between organizations that was previously unimaginable, and it is giving rise to new digital “ecosystems” which connect stakeholders, service providers, partners and vendors in new and unconventional ways.

Digital platforms are at the heart of the ongoing digital revolution. They provide the place for collecting, sharing and aggregating data, performing analytics and delivering new and improved services. Digital platforms help eliminate traditional data-sharing barriers between organizations—connecting all of the providers and people who collaborate to deliver a service. On the commercial side, platforms may connect all members of the product supply chain—from raw materials suppliers to end customers. But this is just the beginning. Wherever there is value to be gained by connecting organizations (or “ecosystems”), digital platforms can open new possibilities. For example, power consumption data from smart building management systems can be shared with local power utilities to better forecast demand and reduce energy costs for a connected city. Today, organizations often leverage cloud-based, as-a-service platforms to greatly reduce startup costs while allowing for rapid expansion as demand grows.

We envision that the digital government of tomorrow will include digitally enabled ecosystems

in each of the mission areas of government (for example, education, health, social security, public safety, economic vitality, quality of life and smart cities). These ecosystems will connect not only the government agencies but parties such as NGOs and the public, too. Successful digital ecosystems will be those with strong governance, standards and platform–enabled interoperability.

As an example, consider that in any country, the health ecosystem is one of the largest and most complex. Digital platforms supporting a connected health ecosystem can drive significant benefits much faster and at a lower cost—from more easily identifying and booking a doctor’s appointment to improving the transition of a patient from a hospital to a community care setting. Implementing such services for the entire ecosystem promises to optimize utilization of costly care facilities while improving the personal health outcomes for the patients being serviced by the system.

While the Platform (R)evolution may be a longer-term reality, platform evolutions are underway. Health, public safety and human services organizations are deploying digital platforms that span multiple jurisdictions to help coordinate service delivery. For example, many public safety and criminal justice ecosystems share information about o�enders or other persons of interest. As these ecosystems evolve, they are moving into real time and are enabling analysis and dissemination of data to and from a greater range of sources. Likewise, open government platforms represent early instances of information marketplaces that combine public and private sector data. Developed by a variety of entrepreneurs, these marketplaces can support a new generation of services. At the same time, digital governments continue exploring the “as a service” delivery options for their core systems. This shift away from on-premise solutions is crucial to helping lay the foundation and build momentum for adopting next-generation digital technology platforms.

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TREND 3

Building a platform for better analytics: New York City DataBridge

The City of New York has long been a leader in using analytics to manage its complex operations.i While it had 4,000+ performance indicators, it lacked the ability to compile and analyze data from multiple agencies. The Mayor’s O�ce of Data Analytics (MODA) was launched to address that challenge. Working with Accenture, MODA designed and implemented a platform for more comprehensive analytics—one that would support better operational decisions and root out fraud and waste. Known as DataBridge, the platform provides both a data repository and a suite of tools that workers can use to analyze all of that data from across City agencies.

Through DataBridge, the City of New York is now equipped to achieve a more robust level of analytics exploration. Employees are empowered to prioritize and better allocate resources, to make decisions based on true need (not just numbers of

citizen complaints), and save lives by helping avoid human catastrophe. In fact, the MODA team has already produced some significant results—including boosting the inspection “hit” rate (from 13 percent to 75 percent) of buildings so dangerous they must be vacated and dramatically increasing detection of business licenses obtained through fraudulent means. The team also helped in identifying the one percent of pharmacies that accounted for more than 60 percent of total Medicaid reimbursements for Oxycodone—the kind of targeted insight that drives the e�ectiveness of follow-up inspections.

In particular, in the next two years, 79 percent of public service respondents expect government to broadly adopt open innovation programs with citizens, suppliers or partners. A majority (77 percent) also expect organizations to move toward real-time platforms and systems as enterprises adopt mobility and Internet of Things solutions.

More than half of public service leaders reported that they are already using or experimenting with Platform as a Service (PaaS) within their organizations.

660%

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Intelligent Enterprise

The trend toward an Intelligent Enterprise is about embedding software intelligence into every aspect of a business to drive new levels of operational e�ciency, evolution and innovation.

In the Intelligent Enterprise, insights aren’t trapped in o�ine systems or delivered to only a handful of workers. Instead, the Intelligent Enterprise spreads insights throughout the organization, enabling a greater number of workers to make more—and more e�ective—decisions.

Intelligence may be embedded in infrastructure (such as utility networks, operational machinery, buildings and vehicles) or within business processes (using software intelligence to help automate steps or provide recommendations and better decision-making insight to the worker). Embedded software intelligence can help

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TREND 4

Through this innovative pilot, Accenture helped the Met Police use predictive analytics to generate risk scores for individuals with connections to known gangs across all 32 of the City’s boroughs. Each individual received a score for his or her likelihood to commit violent crimes in 2013. Once individuals were ranked, they were grouped in to categories by their likelihood to re-o�end. The group-level data was then compared to actual known gang crime activity in 2013 to see how accurately it could be predicted—demonstrating how smarter analytical tools can inform di�erent police interventions to drive better public safety outcomes.ii

London isn’t alone in its use of advanced analytics to fight crime and improve public safety. In France, local police o�cers used a video analytics service platform to detect and assess far more incidents at an annual street market in Lille, providing a better service to citizens and improving safety throughout the event.iii And, in Asia, six Singapore government agencies across law enforcement, transport and the environment helped pilot a “safe city” public safety solution that delivered meaningful insights in real time—enabling a fast response and citizen accountability.iv

governments identify under payment of taxes and, using diverse data sets, find clues to determine the next best action. Other applications of embedded intelligence include enabling operational e�ciency, tracking policy e�ectiveness in achieving target public sector outcomes, and suggesting changes to be made. Indeed, for digital governments, the opportunities and implications are huge. With better software intelligence and data-driven insight, digital leaders can increase e�ectiveness in delivering a range of public service outcomes—from better public safety and social services to increased economic vitality. Getting there requires a cultural shift in the organization, whereby machine intelligence is seen and embraced as an aid in decision making rather than as a threat to workers themselves.

Using smarter tools to fight crime: London Metropolitan Police Service

How could London’s Metropolitan Police Service start predicting—rather than simply reacting to—gang-related violence? Working with Accenture in the first project of its kind in the United Kingdom, the Met Police embraced analytics as a new tool for fighting crime.

Managing data remains a huge hurdle for more than half of organizations in all industries (56 percent)—including public service (59 percent). Nonetheless, in Accenture’s study, 86 percent of public service respondents agreed that software is entering a new era that will dramatically

change the way we use data. And, public service leaders reported making progress in experimenting with or using a range of intelligent technologies, such as rule-based algorithms (74 percent), machine learning (68 percent), predictive analytics (71 percent) and intelligent agents (66 percent) as they advance in their digital government journeys.

of public service leaders agree that managing data remains a huge hurdle.

59%

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CONCLUSION

TREND 5

Workforce Reimagined

Advances in more natural human interfaces, wearable devices and smart machines are extending intelligent technology to interact as a “team member,” working alongside employees in a Workforce Reimagined.

The nature of work is changing. Already we have moved from lifelong employment to periodic employment. The future is poised to bring crowd-sourced employment where work could come from anyone and anywhere. Digital assistants, wearable devices, robotics and digital printing all will supplement people in the workplace, enabling higher productivity and changing the way that work gets done. The future will also bring greater focus on digitally enabled access to and sharing of skills and experience. Governments will scale and extend use of digital mentors, remote working and job sharing—all with the aim of improving productivity, personal growth and well-being.

Importantly, Workforce Reimagined isn’t about drones replacing humans. Rather, it’s about stretching the boundaries of technology far beyond mere automation—applying a new generation of technologies to augment the cognitive, collaborative and physical capabilities of human

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beings. In short, digital leaders will use technology to make their workforces more productive, more e�ective and happier.

For digital governments, a reimagined workforce is one with strong, peer-to-peer collaboration and insights available in the field at the points of service. To make best use of these advances, workers must have the authority to act on insights with minimal “red tape.” For most governments, getting there will require major changes in both governance and culture as part of the journey to becoming a digital leader.

These disruptive trends will continue to create vast opportunities for public service pioneers to fundamentally change the way government operates and interacts with citizens, patients, employees, suppliers, partners and other stakeholders. Public service organizations cannot a�ord to ignore these trends, as their impact is poised to increase exponentially. Bold leaders need to embrace these trends and, even more crucially, to understand their impact on delivering public service for the future. By observing digital innovations in the private sector, the public sector can tune in to important lessons learned—identify potential opportunities to leapfrog commercial thinking—and accelerate the benefits of digital government.

For more on Accenture Technology Vision 2015 for Public Service, please visit: www.accenture.com/publicservicetechnologyvision

ensuring collaboration between the two. In fact, public service (58 percent) is ahead of all industries (51 percent) in considering adoption of software automation or cognitive computing to complement the human workforce.

Already, nearly half of public service respondents (49 percent) are considering technologies that enable business users to complete tasks that previously required IT experts. Further, more than half (67 percent) agree that within three years, organizations will need to focus on training their machines as much as they focus on training their people.

Nearly three-quarters of public service leadersagree that successful organizations will manage employees alongside intelligent machines—

74%

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CONTACT

For more information, please contact:

Dan LondonGroup Chief ExecutiveHealth & Public Servicedaniel.t.london@accenture.com

Connect with us to learn more on delivering public service for the future on Twitter@AccenturePubSvc.

About Delivering Public Service for the Future

What does it take to deliver public service for the future? Public service leaders must embrace four structural shifts—advancing toward personalized services, insight-driven operations, a public entrepreneurship mindset and a cross-agency commitment to mission productivity. By making these shifts, leaders can support flourishing societies, safe, secure nations and economic vitality for citizens in a digital world—delivering public service for the future.

About Accenture

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 336,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$30.0 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2014. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

REFERENCES

i. “City of New York: Using Data Analytics to Achieve Greater E�ciency and Cost Savings,” Accenture.com, 2013. http://www.accenture.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/PDF/Accenture-Data-Analytics-Helps-New-York-City-Boost-E�ciency-Spend-Wisely.pdf

ii. “London Metropolitan Police Service and Accenture Police Solutions Complete Analytics Pilot Program to Fight Gang Crime,” Accenture.com, 2015. http://www.accenture.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/PDF/London-Metropolitan-Police-Service-And-Accenture-Police-Solutions.pdfiii. “Helping a French Public Safety Agency Use Analytics to Drive E�ective Police Solutions,” Accenture.com, 2014. http://www.accenture.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/PDF/Accenture-Helping-French-Public-Safety-Agency-Use-Analytics-Drive-E�ective-Police-Solutions.pdfiv. “Singapore Government: Safe City Test Bed,” Accenture.com, 2014. http://www.accenture.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/PDF/Accenture-Singapore-Government-Safe-City-Test-Bed.pdf

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METHODOLOGY

Every year, the Technology Vision team collaborates with Accenture Research to pinpoint the emerging IT developments that will have the greatest impact on companies, government agencies and other organizations in the next three to five years.

The research process this year began with gathering inputs from the Technology Vision External Advisory Board, a group of more than two dozen executives and entrepreneurs from the public and private sectors, academia, venture capital and startup companies. In addition, the Technology Vision team conducted nearly 100 interviews with technology luminaries, industry experts and Accenture business leaders.

The team also tapped into the vast pool of knowledge and innovative ideas from professionals across Accenture, using Accenture’s collaboration technologies and a crowdsourcing approach to launch and run an online contest to uncover the most interesting emerging technology themes. Over 1,700 participants actively engaged in the contest, contributing valuable ideas and voting on others’ inputs.

Copyright © 2015 Accenture All rights reserved.

Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.

Accenture Technology Vision 2015 Survey Demographics

This year, Accenture conducted the first Technology Vision survey, polling 2,000 business and technology executives—including 162 public service leaders—across nine countries and 10 industries.

The goals: to understand their perspectives on key technology challenges they face, and to identify their priority investments over the next few years. This survey was fielded from December 2014 through January 2015 in Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. Respondents included IT Directors (24 percent), Function Heads (15 percent), CTOs or Chief Mobility O�cers (13 percent), CIOs or Directors of Technology (13 percent), CMOs (9 percent), Line of Business Heads (9 percent) and CSOs (4 percent).

To learn more and read the full Accenture Technology Vision 2015 report, please go to accenture.com/technologyvision.

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