UNIVERSITY

Federal IT and Digital Government: Stretch Your Boundaries

Accenture Technology Vision 2015Accenture Federal Services

Succeeding in the “We Economy”

Organizations across the public and private sector have spent the past few years exploring ways to leverage social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) to transform into digital enterprises. As leaders across federal agencies are discovering, becoming a digital organization is a massive undertaking.

#techvision2015

For inspiration, federal agencies can look to digital leaders that are beginning to do far more than just flex their digital muscles. These organizations are fundamentally changing the way they look at themselves and mastering the shift from “me” to “we.” They are stretching their boundaries by tapping into a broad array of other digital services and devices at the edge of their networks. Leaders eager to drive change are using this broader digital ecosystem to place bets on a grand scale. These digital-savvy organizations are looking to shape entire markets and change the way we work and live.

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INTRODUCTION

ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VISION 2015

The digital era not only makes big bets possible but increasingly necessary. Forward-looking federal agencies are looking for ways to connect every employee, process, product and service to a digital fabric that has the potential to touch all aspects of their organization. More and more, however, agencies are beginning to see that these connections go beyond their employees. They also have the potential to tie into a more collaborative and more productive network of sister agencies, service providers, stakeholders—and the citizens they serve.

This grand network of connections with its transformational power introduces a new era in the digital age—the age of “digital ecosystems.” By tapping into the digital ecosystem, government agencies can tackle challenges that were previously well beyond their scope. They can deploy intelligent machines to improve the safety of military forces in the field, or citizens within our borders. They can improve the quality of healthcare by addressing it holistically across many industries. These are the types of “epic” transformations that excite citizens, inspire employees and galvanize long-term suppliers.

None of this will be easy, and each agency will need to shape its own transformation. But the effort has the potential to deliver tremendous advances in delivering public service for the future.

Technology is moving at a breakneck pace. SMAC has become the driving force behind the rapid evolution of digital businesses. This year’s Accenture Technology Vision highlights five emerging themes that reflect the shift from the “me” to the “we” economy, and that have important implications for federal IT.

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#techvision2015

The Internet of Me: Placing Citizens at the Center of Every Digital Experience

As everyday objects are going online, so too are experiences—creating an abundance of digital channels that reach deep into every aspect of individuals’ lives. The “Internet of Me” describes the emerging interconnected environment in which organizations are building products and services specifically centered on the individual.

This means much more than just personalization for the connected world. Now, the focus has to be on experience. Features and functionality must reflect what individuals are trying to accomplish, enabling them to control, measure and even automate parts of their lives in both the digital and physical worlds.

A few federal agencies are already moving fast in this direction—and reframing the conversation about what digital government can deliver.

Consider how the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) evolved IRS.gov, its consumer-facing website, to support the American taxpayer. The IRS enhanced the site in 2012 to create an integrated enterprise portal. Every aspect of the site—such as intention-based design, language support and easy online filing—centers on taxpayers’ needs. The “Where’s My Refund?” application allows taxpayers to find out when their refund will be delivered by answering three simple questions. The site processed 224 million federal and state tax returns in 2014, backed by an innovative private cloud that allows it to respond to unpredictable and fluctuating seasonal demand.

The U.S. Army’s Live, Virtual, Constructive- Integrating Architecture system provides training and mission rehearsal opportunities to commanders and soldiers through a net-centric linkage that “collects, retrieves and exchanges data among Army training aids, devices, simulations and simulators (TADSS).” The integration of the Live, Virtual and Constructive TADSS with mission command equipment allows for better training events that prepare soldiers for their missions at less cost.1 In another example, virtual reality provides a safe environment to help soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.2

The U.S. Army is using virtual technology to improve training experiences for soldiers by presenting real-world scenarios in a safe environment.

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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VISION 2015

The U.S. Department of Education has made great strides with an audience that typifies the Internet of Me: Millennials. The agency completely re-imagined its customer experience by developing the StudentLoans.gov site as a vital online “port of call” for students and borrowers planning for college.

The site emphasizes financial literacy and awareness to not only help students complete the financial aid process, but also to help them understand the impact of the debt they will carry after they graduate. These features are delivered through a rich user experience that attracts digitally savvy students with interactive tools such as repayment calculators to help students learn about managing debt. Personalized email communications further enhance the customer experience, with messaging tailored specifically to borrowers’ financial situations to help them achieve financial success. Sophisticated analytics help site administrators quickly identify trouble spots with site content—such as confusing questions or vague language—and deploy quick fixes.

The U.S. Department of Education completely re-imagined its StudentLoans.gov site as the first “port of call” for students and borrowers planning for college.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT created a framework to promote sharing of ehealth information among healthcare providers.

The HITECH Act of 2009 authorized the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to establish programs to improve healthcare quality, safety and efficiency through the increased adoption of health IT. As part of its efforts, the ONC created a Standards and Interoperability Framework to evaluate and harmonize standards to promote the seamless exchange of electronic health information among healthcare providers.

Creating the framework involved the creation of more than 28 use cases and functional requirements and the development of over 30 implementation specifications—all with real-world interoperability challenges in mind. By harmonizing health IT standards, the ONC has taken a major step toward its mission of improving health and healthcare for all Americans through the use of information and technology.

As these agencies have shown, to truly become a leader in the Internet of Me environment, leaders need to figure out how the customer experience that their agency “owns” relates to other experiences in the citizens’ lives—and how the agency can help to deliver the outcomes that citizens want.

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#techvision2015

The Outcome Economy: From Driving Activities to Driving Results

Digital disrupters know that the end goal is no longer about driving activities, it’s about driving results. Welcome to the “outcome economy,” which is defined by the ability of organizations to create value by delivering solutions that lead to quantifiable results.

By placing intelligent hardware at the edge—where the digital and physical worlds intersect—federal agencies can capture priceless data that can generate insights into how citizens use their services, along with a deeper understanding of what they ultimately want from those services.

The levels of insight and control that are the hallmarks of the outcome economy are only made possible through the integration of hardware with existing capabilities. Cloud-based software analytics and visualization technologies, along with hardware sensors and increased processing power at the network edge, are all necessary components in the outcome economy.

Part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Biometric Management works to enhance the security of US citizens and visitors, facilitate legitimate travel and trade, help ensure the integrity of the US immigration system and protect visitors’ privacy.3 Its core biometrics solution, which operates at close to 300 points of entry, provides information to nine different types of stakeholder organizations—from agencies within the US federal government to local law enforcement agencies and even foreign governments.

The solution can process up to 400,000 transactions per day and can perform searches on more than 140 million unique identities in seconds, while handling numerous document standards, dozens of languages and occasional conflicts in mandates. The system can return ID matches in less than 10 seconds—and, in less than five seconds, can identify whether a specific traveler is among the approximately 6 million individuals on a Watch List. Every day, on average, the system identifies 5,000 illegal visitors, 2,500 immigration violators, 50 wanted criminals and five murderers.

The system identifies an average of

5,0002,500505

illegal visitors

immigration violators

wanted criminals

murders per day

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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VISION 2015

The U.S. Air Force (USAF) has become more outcome-oriented by using a solution that leverages ServiceNow, a services-management platform, to reduce the complexity of its IT and security infrastructure. When fully realized, the solution is estimated to save over 10 million man-hours of lost productivity a year through process automation, automated provisioning of use access and cloud infrastructure, and standardized forms to expedite software accreditation.

The solution dramatically improves time-to-value enabling a more agile USAF, which means that personnel are focused on achieving the mission and not waiting on IT systems. With the solution built on ServiceNow, the USAF is able to move IT administrators away from data entry and refocus their efforts to become digital warriors.

With every new intelligent device and every new industry group supporting hardware development, the promise of the outcome economy comes that much closer. To take advantage of these new capabilities, federal agencies will need to re-evaluate the intended outcomes of the groups they serve. They must establish feedback loops wherever their users create value and incorporate the resulting insights into their business processes and product management systems.

When organizations gain end-to-end feedback loops that extend all the way to the intersection of the digital and physical worlds, true disruption can occur. This is the value unlocked by the outcome economy.

The U.S. Air Force’s cloud-based services-management platform leverages ServiceNow and saves an estimated

10 million man-hours a year through process automation, automated provisioning of infrastructure, and standardized forms.

illegal visitors

immigration violators

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#techvision2015

The Platform (R)evolution: Building Next-Generation Services and Ecosystems

Digital industry platforms and ecosystems are fueling the next wave of breakthrough innovation and disruptive growth across many industries. Rapid advances in cloud and mobility not only are eliminating the technology and cost barriers associated with such platforms, but also are opening up this new playing field to federal agencies that are looking to streamline supply chains and improve collaboration with other agencies and external partners.

Underpinned by the latest wave of digital technologies—SMAC, and, more recently, the Internet of Things—the “platform” is essentially a well-defined technical architecture, firm governance and a set of technology services all focused on enabling the creation of new industry-specific applications. Platforms serve as a pool of reusable functionality and capabilities to make building and evolving these applications fast and easy—and to help agencies ultimately achieve better outcomes.

By combining the power of technology platforms with their public sector expertise, federal agencies have an opportunity to increase the value of the services they offer.

For years, the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) has been reducing customer wait times and improving productivity through its integrated, end-to-end supply chain. Since implementing Business Systems Modernization (BSM) and Enterprise Business Systems (EBS), DLA has become a model for reducing cost, improving service and enabling compliance by leveraging advanced analytics. The agency has

streamlined planning to achieve more than $500 million in cost savings/avoidance, enabling FFMIA and GRC compliance while positioning DLA for auditability requirements, and achieving $475 million in cost avoidance from the retirement of legacy systems.

DLA continues to improve its capabilities by further expanding its predictive analytics know-how to meet many new requirements—from proactively identifying high-risk procurements to expanding new distribution and stock positioning requirements. As the modern military seeks to become more nimble, DLA is evolving its own platform to serve them more effectively.

$$$$$$$

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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VISION 2015

Similarly, the U.S. Department of State is evolving its own global supply chain to better serve US diplomats. The State Department’s integrated logistics management system (ILMS) streamlines logistics support for diplomats and embassies across the globe, ensuring that US officials have what they need, where they need it. The system supports more than $10 billion in annual procurement spend across more than 450,000 transactions, and tracks nearly 4.8 million assets.

The Department has increased the efficiency of its system for managing a worldwide fleet of more than 14,000 vehicles, replacing manual reports with system-generated processes that allow embassies and consulates to access real-time vehicle use data. In addition, ILMS also now manages the materials and supplies needed to maintain these vehicles and 350,000 other items that keep embassies and consulates running smoothly.

Capturing these “expendable” items in ILMS allows Department procurement and property officials to better manage inventory by identifying purchase and shipping at diplomatic posts. The system also uses real-time supply chain analytics to help prevent overstocking supplies and manage expiration dates of in-stock supplies.

Today, it’s not enough to simply develop and deploy digital tools. Agencies must apply their knowledge to build platforms that allow them to rapidly innovate, develop and deploy the products and solutions needed to drive their digital strategies. This foundation will enable better ways of operating and improve the services that agencies deliver to the public.

Future success will depend on the digital relationships that agencies are creating today. In short, federal leaders must master the shift from “me” to “we” in order to bring these emerging digital ecosystems to life.

The U.S. Department of State’s integrated logistics management system streamlines logistics support for diplomats and embassies across the globe. The system manages the materials and supplies needed to maintain a worldwide fleet of more than

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#techvision2015

Census API to give users precise answers and visualizations to queries on the Census.gov search page. In addition, by consolidating data across all of the agency’s digital platforms, Census created a single view of the customer experience, enabling leadership to understand customer behavior and trends to aid in decision making.

A large federal defense agency has developed an automated business intelligence solution that coalesced and normalized incident management data from each of the three IaaS providers that manage its data centers, creating a single “pane of glass” for viewing real-time incident management performance across the enterprise.

With this transparency and insight, the agency was able to benchmark performance, target areas for improvement and quantify the benefit of improvement initiatives. The results were remarkable. The agency reduced its enterprise-wide incident queue by 69 percent. And a companion business intelligence solution drove down average incident resolution from 48.6 hours to 8.15 hours—an 83 percent reduction. In addition, a self-service auto-provisioning capability allows agency application developers to quickly stand up an environment to develop and test new ideas for mission-related applications in a private cloud environment. By automating manual processes, the agency reduced provisioning times by 98 percent, reduced provisioning labor costs by 90 percent, and expedited time to market of new mission capabilities.

Software intelligence must now be seen as a core capability—one that not only can elevate operational excellence throughout the organization, but also can power innovation. Put simply, government organizations that harness the power and potential of software intelligence will run more efficiently, innovate more rapidly and serve constituents more effectively.

Intelligent Enterprise: Making Machines Smarter to Drive Operational Efficiency, Evolution and Innovation

Until now, increasingly capable software has been geared to help employees make better and faster decisions. But with an influx of big data—and advances in processing power, data science and cognitive technology—software intelligence is helping machines to make even more, better informed decisions. Federal leaders must now view software intelligence as an opportunity to drive new levels of evolution and discovery, propelling innovation throughout the US government.

What will it take for agencies to achieve this capability? The answer lies in realizing that more decisions are being made by software—and that many more decisions can and should be entrusted to machines. This is the era of software intelligence, in which applications and tools take on more human-like intelligence. The ability to make decisions, to self-evolve and to discover represents the foundational aspects of software intelligence today.

For the past three years, the U.S. Census Bureau has pursued a goal of making its Census.gov website a customer-centric destination that serves as the first stop for economic, demographic and geographic data. Census.gov is one of the largest websites in the federal government, with over 46 million annual visits and more than 1 million pages and assets.

The Census Bureau has used a variety of analytics and customer research approaches as part of a transformation strategy that modernizes the agency’s digital presence—everything from user experience and search to mobile access and content management. Census developed “smart search” capabilities that automatically pull information from the

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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VISION 2015

The U.S. Census Bureau

website has more than

46 million annual visits and more than 1 million pages and assets. The Census Bureau has used analytics and customer research to modernize the agency’s digital presence.

A large federal defense agency has developed an

that coalesced and normalized incident management data from each of the three IaaS providers that manage its data centers.

automated business intelligence solution

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#techvision2015

Workforce Reimagined: Collaboration at the Intersection of Humans and Machines

The push to go digital is amplifying the need for humans and machines to do more, together. Advances in natural interfaces, wearable devices and smart machines will present new opportunities for federal agencies to empower their workers through technology.

This will also surface new challenges in managing a collaborative workforce composed of both people and machines. Successful agencies will recognize the benefits of human talent and intelligent technology working side by side—and they will embrace them both as critical members of the reimagined workforce.

For example, NASA already is teaming astronauts and robots together to face the difficult and dangerous task of cleaning up derelict satellites. Outfitted with advanced analytics algorithms and stereoscopic cameras, robot spheres are analyzing space junk to quickly map each piece’s spin, velocity, trajectory and center of mass—allowing astronauts to capture it safely.4

NASA is teaming

astronauts and robots to face the difficult and dangerous task of cleaning up derelict satellites.

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ACCENTURE TECHNOLOGY VISION 2015

The U.S. Air Force is also exploring the potential of human-machine teams. The Air Force issued a presolicitation for innovative research into human-machine collaboration in analyzing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data. The focus is on understanding the reality of the human experience in this area—both strengths and shortcomings. Determining how machines could best supplement operators’ analysis has clear mission-critical implications in an environment characterized by a massive and growing influx of data.5

To best embrace this human-machine symbiosis, agencies will have to train their employees to collaborate effectively with technology—and, in some cases, teach and guide the technology as if it were an apprentice. Smart machines now have the ability to interact with, train and learn from humans, and this enables them to perform better over time. By creating a positive cycle of collaboration between humans and machines, enterprises can drastically improve the outputs of both and embrace the digital age with a reimagined workforce.

The U.S. Air Force is interested in exploring the benefits of

human-machine teams in analyzing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data.

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Stretching the Boundaries of Digital Government

Digital movers are thinking big thoughts and asking big questions: How can we help bring about tomorrow’s smart mega-cities? What can we do to solve the world’s looming food shortages?

Make no mistake: The “We Economy” will require a much different approach to federal IT—one that is liquid, intelligent and connected. Future applications need to be more nimble. Agencies that begin their reinvention now can adapt quickly to the pace of change, manage rising complexity and open doors to more interconnected business environments.

These are the questions for federal leaders: How will your organization exercise its digital advantage? How will your agency take on greater challenges and deliver public service for the future? And ultimately—what will our future be, together as players in the “We Economy?”

CONCLUSION

For more information, please contact:

Thomas Greiner Managing Director thomas.r.greiner@accenturefederal.com

Tim Hoechst Managing Director tim.hoechst@accenturefederal.com

James Collier Managing Director james.l.collier@accenturefederal.com

Visit us at www.accenture.com/federal Follow us @AccentureFed on Twitter Connect with us on LinkedIn

1. United States Army; “Live, Virtual, Constructive-Integrating Architecture (LVC-IA),” November 9, 2012, accessed May 8, 2015 http://www.peostri.army.mil/PRODUCTS/LVCIA/

2. Mark Pomerleau “How Virtual Reality Helps Treat Soldiers with PTSD,” Defense Systems, March 13, 2015, accessed May 8, 2015 http://defensesystems.com/articles/2015/03/13/army-virtual-reality-ptsd-treatment.aspx

3. Established in 2003, the Office of Biometric Management was originally known as the United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) Program.

4. Nick Stockton, “Science Graphic of the Week: Using Cameras and Fancy Algorithms to Trace Spinning Space Junk,” Wired, September 11, 2014, accessed May 8, 2015 http://www.wired.com/2014/09/algorithm-spinning-space-junk/

5. Joey Chung, “Air Force Wants Human-Machine Teams for ISR Analysis,” Defense Systems, July 23, 2014, accessed May 8, 2015 http://defensesystems.com/Articles/2014/07/23/Air-Force-human-machine-ISR-analysis.aspx?admgarea=TC_C4ISR&Page=1

About Accenture Federal Services

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About Accenture

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 323,000 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. Through its Skills to Succeed corporate citizenship initiative, Accenture is equipping more than 3 million people around the world with the skills to get a job or build a business. 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.

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