Tech Vision 2023 in Health & Public Service

At Accenture, every year we do some hard thinking about our vision for the use of technology in the future. We see a new way of being in relationship with technology – and now is the time to?reinvent how we think about it, how we use it, and how we imagine the ways in which it can solve problems. If you work in the public sector, you might be asking yourself,?"What does that have to do with me?"? Here are some ways to think about that. ?

Tech Vision 2023 ?is about the?joining of our physical and digital worlds. Now, the truth is bits (our digital world) and atoms (our physical world) have been on a journey toward each other.?

This journey is a story of two things. It’s a story about a merger and about time.???

Forty years ago – 1983 – Motorola introduced the first cell phone, the DynaTAC 8000x. It was 10 inches long, weighed 2 ? pounds, and had a whopping $4000 sticker price. And it was the butt of more jokes than most of us can remember. Anyone seen putting this ginormous thing up against their ears was instant fodder for Saturday Night Live. And the idea that we’d all soon have phones in our cars? Absurd.??

Ten years later, far more affordable options were on the market. In another 10, cell phones were widely in use. Then came app stores. And new functionality like cameras. Today? Each of us knows exactly where our smartphone is, and we rarely leave a room without it.??

This is where this fascinating story unfolds.??

Let’s take merger first: our walking around life – the physical world – is no longer separate from our technology. We, my smartphone, and I, are one. Why, I’ve solved dozens of problems with it today. Haven’t you???

What’s curious is the power of that merger has yet to be realized in government. In many parts of the public sector, technology is absent altogether. People are still working with index cards and paper forms and big metal filing cabinets. In other parts, technology is present but not as an enabler. It’s slow and frustrating and outdated. Most employees hate their technology and see it as separate from their work. They see it as keeping them from the things they believe they need to be doing to get their jobs done.??

But remember -- I am one with my smartphone. And so are you. And so are all those good people who work in government. When their day is over and they go home, this merger has already happened.?

The work ahead is to provide the public sector with the same kind of merger we all have at home. It means we have critical choices to make:?

• Think about tech as constantly changing and needing to be in the cloud so that it can keep getting updated (Resist the impulse to custom code. When you do that, it becomes static. It’s going to stay exactly like it was the moment you designed it. It’s the rough equivalent of getting a cell phone and never updating the software.)?
• Thoughtfully design tech so that it is fit for purpose and easy to use. This creates speed to understanding and adoption. It reduces the training burden when introducing new technology because it’s obvious how to use it. When ‘how it works’ is not such a mystery, your users will be quicker to understand and adopt new tools. (Think about when you took your most recent cell phone out of the box. You did not go through hours or days of training. You just turned it on and followed instructions).??
• Open our minds to the power of Generative AI. It has enormous implications for the public sector, particularly in how it will improve access to services by automating some functions and acting as a co-pilot to humans so that we are all more informed decision-makers at work. (Think about all the ways you use AI now: to get re-routed while following a digital map that has just alerted you to a traffic jam; to read information aloud to you when you are driving so that you and your loved ones arrive safely to your destination.)??

These are all important, actionable ways we should be thinking about our technology at work.??

Now let’s talk about time. It took the collective “we” 40 years to make the journey to smartphones. That is how fast tech was moving then. That does not even begin to describe what will happen next. Tech will improve at a blistering pace from here on out. What is not possible today will be six weeks from now.??

This presents a challenge unique to the public sector, where technology is rarely replaced or updated. When we are given the chance to make updates, we tend to focus on ways we get things done now – like the current process we use to batch data or process payments – and then we recreate those processes with modern technology. This choice will likely land us right back where we are today, with stale technology that is very hard to update.??

Alternatively, we can act now to leverage modern technology in ways that enable us to keep up with the pace at which it is ready to change. This choice will position government to have technology be its partner in the same way our smartphones are our partners at home. Any other choice means we will continue to merely play catch up.?

This is not a question of whether we should get on this journey. We are on it whether we like it or not. It’s a question of how we will manage the path forward.?