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ACCENTURE INSIGHTS PLATFORM FOR GOVERNMENT

2 | Accenture Insights Platform for Government

With federal agencies operating across all economic sectors, collecting massive amounts of information, there is no shortage of raw data. The challenge is often gleaning actionable insights from this deluge of data—to be able to separate the signal from the noise that will result in smarter, faster decisions that lead to better outcomes for citizens, businesses and governments.

High performing agencies recognize that data is a strategic asset necessary to meet their mission requirements. Many have made significant strides towards becoming insight-driven. They are taking advantage of more accessible data to fight diseases, combat terrorism, detect fraud and improve performance. In some fields, these groundbreaking efforts are without peer.

INSIGHT-DRIVEN GOVERNMENT IS WITHIN REACH

Accenture Insights Platform for Government | 3

What they have found is that more disciplined approaches to data management are making insight more accessible and richer. By shifting to more agile approaches, agencies are taking advantage of more iterative exploration of this data to unlock new insight. Subject matter experts, analysts and data scientists can collaborate more closely, providing the additional context and proven techniques needed to fully exploit data’s value.

However, agencies also recognize that there is more to be done, especially if they want to keep pace with the rising expectations being set by the private sector. The proliferation of data in the public and private spheres has spurred rapid innovations in data storage, extraction, machine learning and visualization—creating a whole new generation of tools and techniques to exploit this data.

These innovations—along with open source software and cloud computing— have improved performance, and brought down the cost of advanced analytics. But they have also introduced complexity, with a cycle of continuous change that can create challenges for large organizations, like federal agencies, with longer procurements and large legacy investments in technology. The issue for many federal agencies is overcoming their own constraints – principally budget, skills and rigid processes – to take advantage of these innovations.

OVERCOMING THE HURDLES TO MOVING AT MISSION SPEEDThe shift to more agile analytics promises to help agencies reduce time-to-value, become more responsive to changing mission needs, and take advantage of more iterative discovery and exploration to produce new insight.

However, this desire to “move fast” tends to bump into the realities of contracting, procurement, and dependencies on legacy systems that could limit the universe of viable, compatible technical solutions.

This often resulted in agencies “making due” with good enough, rather than pushing forward with innovative new solutions driven by a more agile approach to analytics.

For agencies to become more agile, tap into their strategic reserve of data assets and truly improve their mission impact, they need an analytics solution that:

• Takes the risk out of technology selection by delivering on-demand, pre-integrated data access, analytics and visualization capabilities.

• Speeds time-to-value by offering pre-built solution accelerators that are ready to deploy.

• Offers flexible and adaptable contracting to eliminate any dependencies on a single vendor or technology.

• Enables collaboration between subject matter experts and analysts on the rapid development of agency, mission or domain specific solutions.

• Provides a secure environment that meets stringent federal government standards.

ANALYTICS-AS-A-SERVICEAnalytics-as-a-Service brings this all together, delivering all the on-demand analytics capabilities a modern agency needs, and enhancing “speed-to-insight” that results in better decisions and better outcomes. Analytics-as-a-Service also offers a more flexible pricing model that eliminates the need for large upfront investments. Rather, a pay-as-you-go approach allows for variable usage to scale up or down over time.


The Accenture Insights Platform (AIP) is a cloud-based, end-to-end analytics solution designed to simplify the development and deployment of analytic solutions, and deliver real-time, actionable insights. AIP offers customizable analytics-as-a-service to federal agencies that lowers cost and risk while vastly increasing analytic capabilities. AIP provides best-of-breed analytics capabilities that can be readily configured to address unique requirements, and it’s as-a-service delivery model accelerates time to value.

Launched in 2015, AIP is a commercially-proven platform that has already been employed by more than one hundred enterprises. The Accenture Insights Platform for Government—Accenture’s dedicated AIP implementation for the U.S. federal government—is FedRAMP Ready and hosted within the AWS GovCloud region with full-support offered by Accenture Federal Services’ US-based analytics team.

INTEGRATED ANALYTICS SOLUTIONThe platform includes pre-integrated components that comprise the full analytics technology stack: data ingestion, storage, analytics, visualization and custom app design in a single, secure platform. Each component includes industry leading analytic solution providers that are pre-integrated and tested. The AIP platform not only brings speed and agility to get agencies up and running quickly, it also delivers market-leading data and analytic solutions that provide end-to-end coverage of all agency data workload needs.

DATA MANAGEMENTSource & Normalize Data

STORAGEProvision for Big Data Applications

ANALYTICSModel & Analyze Data

VISUALIZATIONDeliver Insight

Core & Legacy Systems, Databases, External Sources, Streaming Data & Iot

AI, Machine Learning & Deep Learning

Extract, Transform, Load

Predictive & Real-time Analytics

Secure, Centralized Repository

Search & Reporting Interactive Visualization

Geo-Spatial Display

HDFS, In-Memory, Columnar

Integrate Into Business Processes

Data Integration

Data Discovery & Modeling

Enable High-Speed, Scalable Processing

Customizable UI/UX

WHAT IS THE ACCENTURE INSIGHT PLATFORM


By having each of the technical components pre-integrated and tested, AIP removes the risk that exists when evaluating multiple technologies that must be integrated. To enable fast and easy roll-out, all of the components and their contracting provisions are included in a single agreement, simplifying procurement and accelerating time to value. With load and performance testing already done, the AIP platform is already set up to scale to meet the needs of agencies dealing with large volumes of data.

The core capabilities of the AIP solution include:

DATA MANAGEMENTSimplifying the most time-consuming aspect of processing legacy data, AIP provides integrated data preparation and extraction tools that ingest, store and analyze data. Sample solution providers include: Informatica and Alteryx.

STORAGETo optimize cost and speed, the platform comes pre-configured with the storage and warehouse layer using standard cloud architectures and other validated storage methods. Sample solution providers include: Cloudera, Hortonworks, DataStax, Enterprise DB and Amazon Web Services.

ANALYTICSFor conducting complex analyses at scale, the analytics capabilities of AIP include toolkits for modeling and processing large data sets. Sample solution providers include: Microsoft RevolutionR and SAS.

VISUALIZATIONTo accelerate time-to-insight advanced visualization capabilities are available using best-of-breed self-service BI and geo-spatial visualization. Sample solution providers include: Qlik and Tableau.

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Multidisciplinary teams using discovery-based, Agile Analytics approaches

Design Studio

Analytics Flash Teams

Industry and function-specific “apps” that integrate into workflow

Visualization Best of breed self-service BI and Geo-spatial visualization

Analytics Building blocks for modelling & processing analytics applications

Storage Cloud architecture and other validated storage

Data Management Integrates data preparation and extraction tools


The integrated Design Studio enables the fast, flexible configuration of advanced analytics applications within AIP. With Design Studio, business users, analysts and data scientists can work collaboratively to deploy analytics as part of a business process with a unique user experience for each target audience.

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Advanced Analytics Applications

Democratize Analytics and integrate 3rd parties

Rapid application development and

runtime environment

Operationalize Model

Human Workflow

Model library (Business User)

Formula Editor

Visual modelling (Part-time analyst)

Page Editor

Direct engine access (Data Scientist)

Business Process

COLLABORATIVE APPLICATION DEVELOPMENTIn today’s world of technology solution development, agile and iterative have replaced the slow and measured waterfall process. The mantra now is to test and refine, challenge assumptions and accelerate learning to arrive at the right solution while taking on less cost and risk. With this new reality in mind, the AIP platform is ideally suited to collaborative development, offering tools and frameworks that enable rapid, collaborative custom development using pre-built components. These components include AIP’s Design Studio and solution accelerators.

DESIGN STUDIOAIP’s Design Studio is a rapid application and runtime environment for the development of tailored business process applications that leverage pre-built data models and powerful analytics. The use of persona-based user interfaces for development allows subject matter experts, analysts and data scientists to collaborate together seamlessly on the design and

build of new solutions. Using pre-built components, ready-made templates and codeless development, they can rapidly create new solutions without writing custom code, including dynamic user experiences for specific use cases.

ACCELERATORSWhile federal agencies face similar demands for scalability, performance and security, the unique missions of each agency often require highly specialized or targeted applications. Meeting these unique requirements in the past often meant months or years of costly development to build custom data solutions from scratch.

Accelerators help to eliminate or minimize the need for custom coding. Instead of starting from scratch, designers can take advantage of a series of off-the-shelf components with pre-built functionality to address specific business areas or processes. This approach can reduce the time, cost and risk associated with developing new systems. Accelerator offerings available with AIP include Analytics Apps as well as Patterns and Frameworks.


Analytics Apps

Accenture has developed over one hundred solution frameworks for AIP to date. Each solution may include data models, statistical algorithms and user interfaces required to build an analytics solution addressing a specific business or functional use case. Currently available solution frameworks address a broad variety of use cases and include:

Compliance Monitoring

Energy Optimization

Fraud, Waste & Abuse Monitoring

Human Capital & Recruitment Analytics

Pricing & Procurement Compliance

Risk Management

Transportation Planning

Agencies can access apps to jumpstart a pilot program, or accelerate the development of a business process or functional application using off-the-shelf components.

Patterns and Frameworks

AIP’s patterns and frameworks are accelerators that support the structural features of the AIP platform, delivering key capabilities that allow for rapid customization and configurations. Patterns include pre-built data interfaces to ETL and storage solutions that eliminate the need for custom coding and enable easier data preparation and extraction of legacy data to be used for analysis and visualization.

Data interfaces are available to handle multiple data types, including: RDM, unstructured files, social media, news feeds, mobile device, sensors and IoT. As agencies advance their data analysis—incorporating new data coming from sensors and devices—data interface adapters help to “onboard” those new data sets quickly and easily.

APPS IN ACTIONAIP’s Analytic Apps provide the foundation for creating strategic, agency-specific enterprise solutions encompassing proven, industry-leading technologies, such as:

Predictive Fraud Detection

Accenture’s fraud detection application supports public sector organizations audit incoming claims to identify potential fraud and anomalous behaviors. Using custom business rules, anomaly detection and predictive analytics, the application identifies and flags risky behaviors for claimants, and assigns each a risk score. The application enables agencies to prioritize the riskiest clients and assign them to the right investigator. This automated process helps reduce the time to detect fraud and minimize future exposure to loss due to fraud. The analytic frameworks used for the application include time series models, regressions, auto-regression, neural networks and GAM models.

Federal Workforce Planning

The integrated analytical workforce planning application is used to forecast future labor and skill demands and optimize fulfillment strategies. By tapping into actual workforce data, the solution provides more accurate, granular and actionable reporting and insight. One example includes simulation modeling can be used to explore alternative recruiting and staffing scenarios. One government agency was able to improve utilization that resulted in cost savings equal to 4% of the overall agency budget.


Spare Parts Inventory Optimization

Inventory optimization uses statistical modeling and forecasting to help automate spare part management. It empowers program managers, business analysts and data scientists to work collaboratively to model agency-specific demand drivers, set alerts, and conduct what-if scenarios. Using time series clustering models, it can track thousands of items with forecasting algorithms accounting for factors like seasonality and utilization trends.

Program Evaluation and Coordination

The Program Evaluation & Coordination application is designed for public health and social service providers seeking to better coordinate constituent services and care across multiple programs. Client segmentation features allow analysts to interactively explore the correlation between specific programs and desired outcomes for overall effectiveness. Forecasting simulation helps policy makers evaluate the potential cost/benefit ratio of various assistance packages in helping constituents achieve long-term self-sufficiency. This framework includes advanced visualizations, demographic and program characteristic segmentation, and in-app alerting for case workers.

INSIGHT SERVICESAccenture’s Insight Services can provide the additional operational, analytical and technical expertise needed to build and deploy game-changing solutions. With Insight Services, agencies can take advantage of proven project methodologies and access analytics experts and data scientists to help solve the biggest, most intractable problems.

Moving from Issue to Insight to Impact

Technology alone is not sufficient to deliver measurable value. The mere act of deploying analytics—taking a “technology-led” approach—has led to many disappointed decision makers, asking for real results, and not getting any. To maximize impact, what’s need is a more comprehensive, disciplined approach that teams can use to fully

recognize the complexities and interdependencies often inherent in the problem; frame the fundamental questions being asked effectively; and ensure that insights are turned quickly into action and impact.

Our Issues-to-Insight-to-Impact approach is designed to address these needs. Using a defined model helps projects start on the right trajectory, maintain alignment with their business objectives and maximize impact by delivering truly actionable insight:

1. Identifying Issues: With any project, having a clearly identified problem to solve is a critical first step. In some cases, the symptom is recognized but not the underlying root cause or contingencies. Framing the issue around specific questions to be answered should drive the project. This often requires deep knowledge of the mission, business, functional and technical landscape as well as targeted exploration to map interdependencies

2. Developing Insights: A critical focus of most analytics projects is identifying the right data, analytical models and data sciences technique to produce the desired insight. These iterative efforts often involve trial and error experimentation using Agile processes. With deep experience and access to a number of pre-built accelerators, our analytics teams can often accelerate this process and identify new, more effective methods for analyzing the data.

3. Creating Impact: Integrating analytic output directly into targeted applications, business processes and decision-making cycles creates actionable insights. And by implementing analytics in this way, the tools and processes become part of a new way of working—creating a more insight-driven culture.


Using this model positions AIP as more than just a technology platform, as it enables it to function as a key element for driving and executing strategy. Furthermore, it also helps project teams better coordinate work and deliver faster, more consistent results.

In the case of Accenture, this model supports over 18,000 analytics professionals supporting more than 6,000 analytics projects worldwide. This knowledgebase and best practices drive our Issues-to-Insight-to-Impact approach as well as many of the accelerators developed already for AIP with more being added regularly.

BENEFITS OF ANALYTICS-AS-A-SERVICEWith AIP offered as analytics-as-a-service, agencies have access to an on-demand platform to create mission-specific analytics and big data solutions in just days or weeks, instead of the months typically required. With usage-based pricing and cloud delivery of the AIP platform as needed, agencies now have a cost-effective alternative for highly complex, time-sensitive projects as well as larger ongoing initiatives.

USAGE-BASED PRICINGFollowing a consumption-based model, the platform eliminates the need for large, upfront capital expenditures. Using a “pay-by-use” pricing model, AIP allows agencies to adjust in the future to any of the following:

• Capabilities: choose the environment and applications that meet your needs at a specific time, and adjust as needed in the future.

• Number of Users: increase or decrease the number of users that have access to the platform.

• Data Volume: scale up your data consumption as demand increases, and down when it recedes.

AIP also makes it easy to prototype and test new data solutions without requiring a large upfront investment in time, money and effort—allowing agencies to invest, scale and innovate without taking on excessive cost and risk.

Agencies can also maximize previous IT investments by applying exiting software licensing arrangements. Agencies that have made investments in analytics or visualization tools can re-use those existing software licenses for the AIP platform, thus eliminating any duplicate software licensing fees.

SAMPLE USE CASESTry Before You BuyPilots or Proof-of-Concepts

For agencies looking to run pilot programs or test a proof-of-concept (POC), AIP provides a fast, low cost way to access new tools and knowledge without a long-term commitment. Using the pre-built components and frameworks, agencies can accelerate development and rapidly test hypotheses. Once the test is complete, they can simply shut down the service, operationalize or scale within the organization. Using the pay-as-you-go model, platform costs only increase when the scale of the deployment expands—the financial commitment is flexible with no upfront sunk costs.

Periodic or Sporadic Requirements Managing Scheduled Spikes in Volume

Many agencies experience seasonal and scheduled increases in activity that create variable usage of processing and analytics throughout the year. Be it tax filing season, or month-end closing, these periods can stress the capacity of systems, requiring additional computing power to meet demand. In the past, the size of the environment and the analytic capabilities had to be responsive to these peak requirements. Since they were only being used periodically or sporadically, this created excess


capacity. With AIP’s analytics-as-a-service model, agencies no longer have to pay for idle capacity, but can ramp up and down capabilities and processing power when needed, paying only for what is used. In many instances, agencies are operating these scheduled processes with legacy systems in need of upgrading. With AIP, agencies can now create test scenarios that replicate these spike volume conditions, testing different tools and methods using AIP to determine the feasibility of moving these systems to a more flexible, scalable and cost effective cloud platform.

Dynamic Scalability or User RequirementsUnforeseen and Unpredictable Demand

For teams that need to quickly and cost-effectively provision highly complex environments, AIP provides a compelling alternative. This is especially true in situations where the exact combination tools and computing capacity is not knowable or accurately predictable—where requirements are more fluid and ad hoc. The challenge is bringing together the right data, tools and techniques for the specific requirement. Having the flexibility to scale up the different tools and data when needed, expands what is possible and leads to new discoveries and insights. Teams are no longer limited to existing solutions, but can quickly adapt to changing circumstances, armed with a broader array of analytic options.

Streamlined Integration and CollaborationCo-creating with Third-Parties

For a number of agencies, collaborating with state and local agencies, non-profits and non-governmental organizations, and the private sector on analytics projects is a regular occurrence. For example, joint research in fields like healthcare, medicine and science often require these organizations to share or combine data. Working with AIP, agencies can take advantage of its extensive security features to safeguard this collaboration and avoiding the need to directly expose their own enterprise systems to third-parties.

CLOUD-BASEDSCALABILITYAccenture’s leadership in IT operations and cybersecurity, combined with the strengths of the AWS platform, combine to offer a highly scalable, available and secure environment. With cloud-based delivery, on-demand IT resources are readily available in minutes to allow agencies to scale up when needed. AIP for Government runs on AWS GovCloud, delivering the comprehensive analytic tools and services agencies need in a secure and scalable environment. Agencies can move from pilot test to Big Data production deployment in a matter of weeks.

SECURITY Accenture’s AIP implementation for the U.S. federal government is available within the AWS GovCloud region, which has been granted a Joint Authorization Board Provisional Authority-to-Operate (JAB P-ATO) and multiple Agency Authorizations (A-ATO) at the moderate and high impact level. Clients can also choose to host AIP for Government within the AWS US East or US West regions if they prefer

AIP for Government itself is FedRAMP Ready today and has completed a successful FedRAMP JAB assessment with a Third-Party Assessment Organization (3PAO), Veris Group LLC (now Coalfire Systems). Due to its compelling and unique value proposition, AIP for Government has been accepted into the competitive FedRAMP Connect program, with accelerated JAB P-ATO at the moderate level expected Summer 2017. AIP is fully supported by a dedicated, U.S. based team to provision, manage and maintain each unique client environment.


It takes advantage of security best practices from Amazon Web Services, major software vendors and Accenture’s own leading cybersecurity practice to harden and secure the platform and achieve certification with key third-party standards. AIP for Government employs single tenant virtual private clouds (VPC) so each client operates in a separate instance. Robust user identity and access control, including FIPS 140-2 validated cryptography and support for multifactor authentication, provides both safeguards and auditability.

CONCLUSION In an increasingly complex and fast moving world, agencies face unprecedented challenges keeping pace with change, improving services and tackling some the biggest problems our society faces. The good news is that there is now a whole new set of analytic tools and methods to help agencies better understand these challenges, and make informed decisions that will deliver real impact now and in the future.

In the face of rapid change, agencies can now be more agile by adopting as-a-service approaches to procuring the technical tools and analytics expertise needed to stay ahead of the curve. To be agile, analytic solutions need to deliver: on-demand, pre-integrated data access, analytics and visualization capabilities in a secure, scalable environment. These are the essential tools that will enable agencies to create an insight-driven culture able to make an impact.

Penetration and other vulnerability testing is used to protect against external attacks at the application, software and hardware levels and to validate network isolation. Security design patterns are used for compliance with data privacy laws, such as HIPAA and other regulations governing the use of PII, with AIP for Government earning HiTRUST certification. Dedicated, U.S. based security monitoring and management encompasses both advanced threat analytics and integrated incident response.

Copyright © 2017 Accenture All rights reserved.

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

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:Tom GreinerSenior Managing Director and Technology Platform Lead Accenture Federal [email protected]

Ira EntisManaging Director and Strategic Solutions & Emerging Technologies Lead Accenture Federal [email protected]

Kristy KinneySenior Manager and Analytics Strategy & Go-to-Market Lead Accenture Federal [email protected]

Dottie SwansonSenior Manager and AIP for Government Asset Lead Accenture Federal [email protected]

ABOUT ACCENTURE FEDERAL SERVICESAccenture Federal Services is a wholly owned subsidiary of Accenture LLP, a U.S. company, with offices in Arlington, Virginia. Accenture’s federal business has served every cabinet-level department and 30 of the largest federal organizations. Accenture Federal Services transforms bold ideas into breakthrough outcomes for clients at defense, intelligence, public safety, civilian and

military health organizations.

ABOUT ACCENTURE Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries and all business functions —underpinned by the world’s largest delivery network—Accenture works at the intersection of business and technology to help clients improve their performance and create sustainable value for their stakeholders. With approximately 401,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture drives innovation to improve the way the world works and lives. Visit us at www.accenture.com.

Accenture Analytics, part of Accenture Digital, helps clients to use analytics and artificial intelligence to drive actionable insights, at scale. Accenture Analytics applies sophisticated algorithms, data engineering and visualization to extract business insights and help clients turn those insights into actions that drive tangible outcomes—to improve their performance and disrupt their markets. With deep industry and technical experience, Accenture Analytics provides services and solutions that include, but are not limited to: analytics-as-a-service through the Accenture Insights Platform, continuous intelligent security, machine learning, and IoT Analytics. For more information, follow us @ISpeakAnalytics and visit www.accenture.com/analytics.

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