Public service agencies want to take advantage of intelligent technologies to transform the ways their organizations adapt their missions and achieve their goals. However, challenges including legacy IT, leadership shortcomings and the inability to hire appropriately skilled personnel persist, according to a recent survey.
Interviewing tech pros from Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Norway, Singapore, the U.K. and the U.S., professional services company Accenture found respondents believed technologies such as biometrics, advanced analytics and predictive modeling could improve service delivery, reduce risk, tighten security and improve job efficiency of employees.
Customer engagement and satisfaction was also cited as a key motivator for adopting automation, though it ranked far below improving the satisfaction of current employees (a cause for implementation cited by 80 percent of those surveyed).
Over three-quarters (77 percent) of agencies appear to be evaluating or piloting projects, and 89 percent believe the Internet of Things, machine learning, video analytics and identity analytics could show a return on investment within two years.
However, the lack of internal training programs and the low (38 percent) ratio of senior leadership that seems informed about these technologies’ potential has 51 percent looking to the private sector for new hires.
Of the public-sector leaders reporting, 68 percent have already looked to the private sector for help to meet citizen demand in some way and are open to public-private partnerships. Additionally, issues with legacy integration have contributed to 65 percent of those surveyed to consider “as a service” models rather than creating their own analytics initiatives from scratch.
The entire report can be viewed on Accenture.com.
Hiring, legacy IT challenges hampering modernization, says survey
