Social services agencies eye emerging tech's benefits

Government agencies in the social security and revenue collection arenas have highlighted emerging technologies as tools of great benefit to their enterprises in a new survey from Accenture.

Eighty-four and 76 percent of respondents respectively from social security and revenue agencies singled out emerging technologies as their top anticipated benefit, according to the survey. Those agencies in particular cited risk reduction and fraud prevention as functions that would get boosts from analytics and biometric technologies.

That share exceeds the 68-percent figure from border agency respondents that saw emerging technologies as beneficiary to them with increased protection a specific outcome they cited.

Accenture surveyed 774 technology leaders at government organizations responsible for citizen services in nine countries: Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Norway, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the U.S.

Responses on the benefits of biometrics widely varied as 52 percent of U.S.-based respondents backed those tools for use to reduce risk and bolster data privacy and security. Only 12 percent of respondents in Japan shared that sentiment.

Sixty-nine percent reported efforts to deploy or consider deployments of biometric platforms with public safety the highest-adopting sector at 52 percent.

Seventy-one percent of respondents said they are deploying new analytics and predictive modelling tools with the highest adoption rates in revenue and social services at 81 percent and 80 percent, respectively. Next were border agencies at 74 percent and public safety at 62 percent.