Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

Authored By: David Sentongo, Product Strategy Leader – Kofax

Organisations, including those in the public sector, have started embracing robotic process automation (RPA) in recent years. In the span of a decade, we have gone from educational conversations concerning “what it is” to rapid adoption and pilots across several agencies. The largely manual and document-driven nature of many government processes has presented a need to rethink how work is done. Several agency leaders have recognized and acted on such a tremendous opportunity: delivering better citizen service and operating with greater purpose using automation technology.

The idea of shifting employees to higher-value work has become a tangible thing; It is happening in pockets across several agencies. Robotic process automation, which employs ‘bots’ to automate and standardise repeatable business processes can help with budget constraints and limited resources to deliver mission-critical activities. It increases the efficiency of existing operations so that more can be done with current resources—allowing agencies to shift staff from low-value to high-value work, improve business processes, transform culture and improve morale.

The new push to advance automation across government reflects the vast, and mostly untapped, opportunity to realise gains in productivity, efficiency and quality. This is where organisations that can achieve a state of “hyperautomation” can change the game and the very nature of how public service is delivered. Furthermore, newcomers are now supported not only by the prior success of their peers, but also by regulation. There could not be a better time to innovate within the public sector.

Smart Digital Transformation: An Integrated Platform Approach

As defined by Gartner, hyperautomation refers to “an effective combination of complementary sets of tools that can integrate functional and process silos to automate and augment business processes.” Gartner labels such a combination of complementary tools as the “DigitalOps Toolbox.”

The DigitalOps Toolbox includes RPA, process discovery, process mining, BPM and several other technologies referenced in the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act. Agencies that achieve a state of hyperautomation can successfully converge these technologies to transform more processes than could ever be done with RPA alone. Those who operate in a state of hyperautomation realise greater operational efficiencies and citizen satisfaction as technology and people work together seamlessly to digitize end-to-end business operations.

Achieving hyperautomation provides a strong foundation for scale. Transforming a complex and manual process into something that is performed faster and more efficiently many times translates into a collaborative ecosystem of complementary technologies and people working together to enable such an outcome. It is not, for example, RPA working in a silo and then people checking in sporadically in hopes that nothing is broken down. This is the basis behind Gartner’s DigitalOps Toolbox; research has been done to identify a robust set of complementary technologies that give organizations the greatest coverage and ability to transform operations with automation.

By deploying a DigitalOps Toolbox, government agencies can better serve constituents, improve federal employee job satisfaction, comply with regulations and drive overall efficiency. This means freeing staff from manual tasks to focus on providing higher-value, more personalised citizen service and replacing slow paper-based case management with more accurate automated processes such as capturing, classifying and understanding data at the point of entry from a variety of formats (including handwritten documents and emails).

“The idea of shifting employees to higher-value work has become a tangible thing; It is happening in pockets across several agencies. Robotic process automation, which employs ‘bots’ to automate and standardise repeatable business processes can help with budget constraints and limited resources to deliver mission-critical activities.”

Automation brings tremendous value to their public sector customers by converging and integrating several technologies within the DigitalOps Toolbox into an integrated platform.

Agencies who partner with technology companies like this are better positioned to achieve hyperautomation faster and more efficiently than those who attempt to build their DigitalOps Toolbox with a variety of technology vendors. Organisations that achieve hyperautomation are best positioned to meet their transformation goals and simultaneously empower their workforce to focus on more meaningful work. Delegating repetitive, low-value tasks that starve federal agencies of their productivity and effectiveness to an Artificial Intelligence-enabled digital workforce is a win for federal employees and for taxpayers.

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