NTT DATA has completed the first phase of building a digital archive system for the ASEAN Cultural Heritage Digital Archive (ACHDA) project to help digitize valuable historical cultural heritage of ASEAN countries, the company announced on Wednesday.

“It is my sincere hope that the value of this initiative will be widely known throughout ASEAN, and that by conveying the precious cultural assets of the present to future generations, new culture will be fostered,” said Katsuichi Sonoda, senior vice president of NTT DATA.

NTT DATA’s digital archive was developed by integrating 160 cultural assets from Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. The cultural heritage archive will be made publicly available for anyone in the world to view online at the ACHDA website after Feb. 27, 2020.

ASEAN’s ACHDA project has enabled the digitization of 3D objects, including shape, color and texture data to be preserved and made available to the public. This has been achieved by expanding the capabilities of our digital archiving solution AMLAD to prevent cultural heritage assets from being lost due to disasters, accidents, and aging and to allow long-term preservation.

NTT DATA’s system will support the images, audio recordings and video data that are available on other NTT DATA digital archive systems, as well as an expanded capability to handle three-dimensional models of physical objects.

The second phase of the project has been expected to begin in fiscal year 2020 and will digitally archive cultural assets from Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar and Laos to make the countries historical evidence available on the archive site.

Going forward, the project will be expanded to include all ten ASEAN member states in the future. The project has been funded by Japan-ASEAN Integration Fund (JAIF), established in 2006 with the contribution from the Japanese government.

Future work is being considered by the ASEAN Secretariat, and NTT DATA plans to further contribute to ASEAN by digitizing cultural heritage assets and building a sustainable digital archive system in all 10 ASEAN countries.

About NTT DATA

At NTT DATA Services, we drive outcomes that keep our clients a step ahead in this digitally dynamic world. Headquartered in Plano, Texas, our team of more than 50,000 professionals worldwide works with you to address today’s challenges, and tomorrow’s — whether it’s to help jump-start your cloud migration, reinvent the customer experience, streamline business processes or upgrade aging infrastructure.

Accenture has released a global study, showing that the majority of citizens are willing to share personal information with government agencies in exchange for better service, the company announced on Wednesday. 

“In recent years governments have taken positive steps to secure and protect citizen and organizational data. However, corresponding regulatory measures have at times also prevented government agencies from using customer data in innovative ways to enhance customer service,” said Eyal Darmon, managing director in Accenture’s Health and Public Service.

Accenture conducted the study based on a survey of more than 6,500 respondents across 11 countries in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. The results found that 41 percent of respondents were satisfied with the level of interaction received from government departments over the last year, 58 percent said they are not aware of a way to share service-related feedback with government agencies.

Additionally, 84 percent of respondents said they are open to sharing their personally identifiable information with a government department in exchange for a more personalized customer service experience. 

78 percent of citizens said they see benefits to using virtual agents, AI-enabled customer-service assistants or chatbots, to receive services from government agencies. 47 percent said they would like to complete some transactions using virtual agents.

Half of respondents said they believe their query could be resolved in the shortest possible time using a virtual agent, and 49 percent anticipated benefits from the 24/7 access to government services. 41 percent of respondents said the use of virtual agents would reduce their need to wait for a human customer service agent to become available to assist them.

“Unfortunately, early investments in chatbots generally haven’t delivered the transformation that government agencies expected, often because agencies didn’t fully consider a citizen’s experience in engaging with a chatbot or what activities a chatbot is capable of undertaking to support the mission of the organization,” Darmon said.

The survey additionally included country comparisons of respondents answers from Singapore, Norway, Finland and Austria, reporting that 88 percent of respondents from Norway and Finland are willing to share their personally identifiable information with a government department in exchange for a more personalized customer service experience. 79 percent of respondents from the U.S. felt the same.

“Our research found that citizens support the use of advanced AI-enabled virtual agents by government agencies. Clearly, an opportunity exists for governments to use virtual agents to broaden their services and enhance customer experience.”

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 505,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture drives innovation to improve the way the world works and lives.