Today, technology has become core to virtually every aspect of business and government, making every business a digital business and requiring that all senior leaders be able to understand, embrace and drive value from new technologies that affect their organization. The Accenture Technology Vision 2013 looks at the future of enterprise IT and makes recommendations on how organizations can take advantage of technology and software to improve their operations and business results.
Accenture has identified seven key revenue technology trends that revenue agencies should harness to create sustainable value and respond to current challenges:
Relationships at Scale: Taxpayers no longer just pay tax—their views, concerns and experiences of an agency as expressed in social media have an immediate and powerful effect on other taxpayers. Business is responding to the power of the consumer influence by seeking to manage and monitor these new relationships. The same opportunity arises for revenue agencies. Just as business is using social media to successfully target and influence consumers in the digital world, revenue agencies are using similar approaches to target taxpayers—for example, by using revenue technology to focus on sites that might represent fiscal or behavioral risk—with appropriate messaging to influence their actions.
Design for Analytics: Overwhelming amounts of data are now available, with more and more sources of data emerging. Revenue agencies, like business, need new processes to determine the right data for them to collect, based on the outcomes they want to achieve. Agencies will use data not just to more accurately determine tax liability and establish risk of non-compliance, but to understand root causes of non-compliance (e.g. rogue point-of-sale software) and the causal factors in taxpayer behavior. Designing for all these outcomes is the next step for revenue agencies in becoming more insight driven.
Data Velocity: Agility is a big challenge for revenue agencies as government demands faster and faster turnaround of legislative initiatives. New revenue technology increases the speed at which data can be gathered, sorted and analyzed to produce insights on which managers can act quickly and deploy new solutions. Revenue agencies will increasingly seek a hybrid mindset from developers, which distinguishes those aspects of a solution to be delivered immediately, possibly with powerful new processing technologies, from those aspects that can be allowed to take longer. Powerful unstructured data processing also enables faster and better real-time decisions for revenue officials and others involved in similarly immediate analysis.
Seamless Collaboration: Revenue agencies increasingly rely on partners and third parties to provide data and to undertake tasks supporting revenue processes. Agencies are embedding social media and collaboration tools in their processes to encourage employee and supply chain partner collaboration, with surprisingly positive results. When taxpayers recognize that an agency is internally connected through revenue technology, they alter their behavior accordingly. Collaboration also provides an opportunity for revenue agencies to adjust their own culture to create a more seamless face to the taxpayer and to their partners.
Software-Defined Networking: Under fiscal pressure and in seeking to be more citizen-centric, governments are demanding greater consolidation of IT, whether that be through government data centers, private clouds, shared applications or shared data. SDN will reinforce this trend by simplifying the networking challenges implicit in greater consolidation.
Active Defense: Revenue technology allows agencies to handle vast amounts of personal and private data. However, as with business, the pace and complexity of threat development suggest that data leaks are inevitable and possibly more damaging given the nature of the data involved. It is therefore essential that revenue agencies establish a second line of defense and proactively analyze, assess and counteract security threats.
Beyond the Cloud: As revenue agencies start to deploy revenue technology applications in the private cloud and in government data centers, businesses have already accepted the cloud as another part of the IT infrastructure. Public cloud, while not used for mission-critical applications in many businesses, is now a default choice for many other applications and software-as-a-service (SaaS) is now routinely woven into the IT fabric of the enterprise. Revenue agencies too will shift to a hybrid approach to the cloud—one that understands the inherent cloud concerns of revenue but also routinely integrates appropriate cloud applications within their IT estate.
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