The Applied Intelligence Discovery Lab: Uncovering Insight at Mission Speed

For centuries, explorers have headed into the unknown and been heralded for returning with valuable knowledge and insight. These days, however, it can be argued that the next great frontier for the federal government isn’t a place, it’s more likely to be the mountains of data that the government owns or has access to but hasn’t yet analyzed and pieced into crucial insights.

Data can play a pivotal role in mission success, but this potential value is too often unrealized. It can be difficult to know exactly what insights your data can deliver — or what tools, technologies and expertise it takes to bring those insights to the fore. Moreover, starting from scratch to analyze and make use of data can seem daunting on several levels, particularly when budgets and timelines must be maintained.

That is why Accenture launched its Applied Intelligence Discovery Lab, a service that looks to help federal agencies explore and understand the value of their data, and even prototype and launch new artificial intelligence (AI) solutions and user-driven visualizations.

The Applied Intelligence Discovery Lab offers agencies access to expertise, strategies, and solutions, ultimately helping them to structure and understand their data better and — if they’re looking to go one step further — leverage leading commercial technologies, cutting-edge frameworks and models to turn that data into mission-specific insights.

This is a lot of ground to cover, admits Dr. Liz Hohman, the Lab’s lead at Accenture Federal Services. That’s because when it comes to data, every agency has unique problems, needs, requirements and information available. So, Hohman and her highly trained team of data scientists, engineers and visualizers work closely with agency stakeholders on each project to deliver the knowledge and tools each agency needs.

“Over the last 18 months, we’ve completed more than 60 projects. A lot of those entailed providing data governance, design and integration strategies, but an almost equal amount included more targeted solutions and prototypes for specific challenges,” says Hohman.

The central thread is that each project delivers tailored insight from agency data, insight that was previously hidden but now can be used to answer critical questions. From there, Accenture can help to scale the design or prototype to integrate it into agency operations and existing decision-making.

“The value statement of the Discovery Lab is our ability to bring together a team of experts to work hand-in-hand — very closely and collaboratively — with clients to quickly develop and test potential solutions,” says Hohman. “We’re an accelerator.”

Whether it’s strategy, solutions or something else, working quickly to determine what’s possible is a hallmark of the lab.

“The ultimate value of data science and advanced analytics is in accelerating and improving human decision-making,” says Hohman. “We have a strong focus on human-centered design, trying to understand what information individuals need to do their job better. Using our design intelligence approach, we often work backwards from there to build systems and models to answer their questions.”

While led by the analytics, AI and automation practice at Accenture Federal Services, the Discovery Lab is also part of the Accenture Federal Digital Studio, the company’s multidisciplinary team applying design thinking across the federal government. This provides access to a deep skillset in human-centered design, user experience and rapid prototyping. Working together, these teams can not only develop solutions that present insight in the most contextually effective way, but also identify ways to enrich the data as it’s being collected.

This is just the case with a federal agency, which recently wanted to pursue new ways to access and use its data as it moved away from legacy technology and toward newer, digital systems that could more easily capture data and make it accessible — a familiar issue for many federal agencies.

“A common problem we see across federal government is that many agencies are saddled with old technology systems that they are using to capture their most critical mission information,” says Jenna O’Steen, a managing director with Accenture Federal Services.

“As they retire those old systems and adopt modernized case management systems, one of the questions that comes up is how to maximize the data that’s available,” she adds. Historically, much of the data in the system has been inaccessible, siloed and unsearchable. Moreover, those working within government today are used to more modern commercial technologies, like Google, and want to access data in a way that is searchable and intuitive.

“Helping to unlock this trapped value is where the Applied Intelligence Discovery Lab comes in,” O’Steen says. “You can’t just ask the user what they want, because often they don’t know what’s possible in terms of analysis and data. Instead, we bring in a team to observe how they operate and deconstruct their information flow. We then conduct a series of rapid prototyping exercises that draw out different options on what’s in the realm of the possible, building a roadmap to get where we want to go.”

Using these insights, the Discovery Lab worked with the agency to bring forward relevant capabilities that would integrate with the client’s current proprietary architecture, deliver a full breadth of analytics abilities and keep pace not only with what they need today, but with new capabilities on the near-term horizon.

It’s important to note, however, that not every data project is worth pursuing. And that’s valuable knowledge to have, says Hohman.

“Federal agencies are seeing more and more sales pitches around data science and are feeling more pressure than ever to adopt turnkey AI solutions,” says Hohman. But just applying AI to a data set is unlikely to garner true results for agencies. First, they need to know what mission-relevant questions can be answered with data science and AI, and what tasks can be improved.

“In order to make the best decisions, agencies need to understand their current data pipeline: what data they have, how it's coming in, how it gets changed, processed through its workflow and what outputs are produced,” says Hohman. “Once they understand that, only then can they see the possible solutions they could implement along the way to increase efficiency, and the lift it will take to get there. If they don’t do that, they are at risk of being sold a solution that might not be of true value.”

That full picture of data can not only help agencies prioritize projects, but it can also help them improve the data they have to glean more robust and accurate insights, increasing efficiencies for the user, helping to infer and identify missing or incomplete data, and recognizing in real time a change in the data that could indicate a larger issue.

Moreover, it’s vital that organizations take the time to understand what they’re measuring before they dive in — a more difficult task than it seems.

“Political scientist Christopher Achen noted ‘to replace the unmeasurable with the unmeaningful is not progress’," said Hohman. “As we work with clients, it’s important to validate that their data represents the underlying measure they’re trying to capture. We’re helping them make data-driven decisions, so we need to make sure the data is measuring what we think it is.”

Taking the time to understand the data on the front end ensures that federal clients can prioritize their spending accordingly — and not push investment and resources into a solution that ultimately may not deliver.

When implemented effectively, with full visibility into the data ecosystem and an understanding of how to best get and measure results, data can offer true value.

Ultimately, as agencies continue delivering effectively and efficiently on the mission, they will need to look at new ways to use their data to deliver truly valuable, accessible insights. Accenture’s Applied Intelligence Discovery Lab is poised to help them do that.

“With the rise of both the cloud and artificial intelligence, the state of play is changing dramatically,” adds Bryan Rich, Managing Director and Applied Intelligence practice lead at Accenture Federal Services. “We’re focused on helping clients explore the art-of-the-possible in a structured manner to reduce their risk in deploying advanced data science and machine learning solutions. Our goal is to help them build solutions that are scalable, repeatable and extensible.”