Fortunately, advances in process automation and AI are giving government agencies new capabilities to identify system bottlenecks and streamline business and operations processes in ways that can improve business and mission outcomes in a fraction of the time and cost of traditional IT modernization projects.

Today’s business process mining and automation tools allow “executives to shift their dependence on outsourced knowledge to in-house control for continuous problem-solving,” according to Todd Schroeder, formerly a U.S. Department of Agriculture IT systems chief who is now vice president for public sector at UiPath. “That translates into a radically different time-to-value modernization quotient — and a radically lower cost structure,” he says in the report produced by Scoop News Group and underwritten by UiPath.

The report “How Automation and AI are Changing the Traditional Approach to Government IT Modernization” highlights how robotic process automation has evolved from a tool to streamline redundant tasks such as financial accounting work to what has increasingly become an enterprise-wide effort to improve mission outcomes.

One example cited in the report is the work underway at the USDA’s Intelligent Automation Center of Excellence office. The office is automating routine processes across the department and fostering a rising generation of “citizen developers” to automate work processes in individuals’ respective jobs.

The report also highlights how automation work that began in the Navy’s Financial Management and Comptroller’s Office is now expanding to improve operations in other Naval support offices and between different departments in government.

Schroeder says agency leaders are on the verge of realizing even greater capabilities with UiPath’s push into AI. UiPath’s AI Trust Layer platform, he says, provides customers with a new level of “auditability, traceability, observability, and replicability” when applying AI to business processes.

“This is the moment,” says Schroeder, “when agency leaders not only have the means to rethink how they modernize but reimagine how federal workers can accomplish their work in new and more effective ways. And that’s critical if the government is to catch up and meet the needs of society’s requirements.”

Download and read the full report.  

This article was produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop and sponsored by UiPath.

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“Automation enables [the U.S.] Army to create new capabilities in legacy systems without investing resources into changing the underlying system,” said Raj G. Iyer, former CIO of the U.S. Department of the Army. Iyer was one of several government officials cited in the report, produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop and sponsored by UiPath, who detailed how automation is making a significant difference in their organization.

Iyer, who stepped down from his position at the end of last month, explained how the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Financial Management and Comptroller) office recently completed a pilot program where robotic process automation (RPA) expedited the handling of unmatched financial transactions. The ASA (FM&C) office handles more than one million such transactions per year, according to Iyer. “RPA is expected to save millions of dollars in manual labor each year,” he said.

“I think that automation — specifically using bots — is really starting to take off and provide value to businesses,” added Krista Kinnard, chief of emerging technology in the CIO’s office at the U.S. Department of Labor.

Kinnard and others explained that automation isn’t just speeding up workflows but boosting productivity and improving agency services faster, at lower costs and with less risk than big-ticket IT modernization projects.

“Automation is moving from the edges, all the way inside into the enterprise. That’s a big change,” observed Sunil Madhugiri, chief technology officer at U.S. Customs and Border Protection, where approximately 250 automation “bots” are in production or under development, according to the report. Madhugiri highlighted one instance where automation helped CBP work with international airlines to notify and divert some 239,000 travelers from boarding U.S.-bound flights due to Covid restriction rules during the pandemic.

The report highlights how automation can effectively “operationalize” mission and business processes at federal agencies and deliver cost savings and service improvements that often prove elusive in IT modernization overhauls.

“Modernization has become synonymous with big, ‘rip-and-replace’ efforts, involving new systems, long-term physical transformations that are costly in technology, change management, workforce, opportunity cost, and time to value,” noted Mike Daniels, senior vice president, public sector at UiPath. “[Government agencies] have made huge investments to forklift systems to the cloud. But what’s gotten lost in that process is the need to examine whether those efforts drive a result quicker, faster or better.”

Todd Schroeder, a former chief of digital services at the U.S. Department of Agriculture who now serves at UiPath as public sector vice president, adds that automation platforms not only bring the power of scale to the work agency employees need to get done but can also address process pain points quickly. He cites in the report how the New York Department of Labor, despite a 10-fold increase in temporary staff, couldn’t keep up with demand for unemployment claims during the pandemic — and how deploying UiPath tools not only cut through the backlog but later helped save New York an estimated $12 billion in potential fraud.

Read the full report on how automation is helping government agencies improve mission services.

This article was produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop and sponsored by UiPath.

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RPA uses software technology that enables humans to easily build, deploy and manage digital robots that can perform manual, often repetitive functions. Over the last several years, it’s been having an impact across the government — including in the Air Force.

“RPA and artificial intelligence are not about cutting personnel,” Air Force Deputy CIO Winston Beauchamp said Tuesday during a UiPath event produced by FedScoop. “We realize that our mission set is growing and continues to grow. We’re not going to get more [staff], but we are going to continue to be asked to do more and more with the resources that we have. So in order to take on those new missions and continue to adapt to the technologies and challenges that we face in an ever-evolving world, we need to be able to make better use of the people that we have.”

The military service is leveraging emerging AI-aligned technologies like RPA to make decisions faster and better.

Air Force officials have seen some progress developing such solutions. But to drive more — and faster — innovation, they launched the RPA accelerator to simplify the making of relevant human-assisting software bots. 

Beauchamp highlighted some of the unfolding RPA use cases that are maturing with support from the accelerator, including bots associated with automated target recognition — and separately, automation to enhance critical weather models with additional data. 

More than 400,000 military service members each year typically receive orders to make a permanent change of station (PCS) for their next assignments. For many military insiders, Beauchamp said, PCS can introduce unnecessary complications or frustrations. So, his office is also working to deploy technologies to automate PCS-related processes.

“This is an area that I think is a pain point for a lot of people. It’s a retention issue, frankly, when people have to wait a year for their household goods to show up, for example,” Beauchamp noted. These are the sorts of things that give people pause about reenlisting or staying in the military.

Beauchamp later told FedScoop more about his office’s journey driving new automations. He said the five deployments that only took a week to launch through the accelerator demonstrate that “the barriers to entry are low” — and Air Force officials want to keep it that way.

“We are, to the maximum extent possible, trying to make this organic, coming from the functional areas, proposing and introducing areas to do RPA,” Beauchamp explained.

“We are fully aware that we don’t have all the answers at the Pentagon, and that the real innovation is happening in the wings and the squadrons. They’re closest to the work, and frankly, they’re unique. Every airborne platform and every weapon system has its own quirks, and the folks that are closest to it know where it makes sense to [deploy the technology and] where it doesn’t. But there are some things that are universal,” he said.

It’s ultimately those common “pain points,” like PCS processes, that the Air Force wants to consider automation to solve in the near term, he added.  

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As the demands on federal and state government agencies for the delivery of timely public services continue to grow, it’s more crucial than ever for agency leaders to proactively expand the use of automation to help build capacity and support employees to meet the growing demand.

Chris Townsend, Vice President, Public Sector, UiPath

Automation technology has evolved significantly in recent years. It’s no longer just a scripting tool to automate basic business tasks. It now has the capability to help organizations and their operating units tackle greater volumes of work. But it can also help them address more challenging business issues — such as accelerating digital modernization, claims processing, improving customer service, reducing fraud, waste and abuse — while also delivering public services faster and more cost-effectively.

At the same time, employees are coming to appreciate how automation can serve as a powerful enabler — to help them achieve more, enhance their work, and give them more time to focus on the most important work.

The need to deploy automation has taken on even greater urgency as government organizations continue to face staff and skills shortages in the ongoing pandemic.

The capabilities inherent in today’s automation platforms also represent a timely and potent solution for those stepping into customer experience leadership roles at federal agencies, especially in light of new directives in the White House Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience.

The Executive Order, issued in December, seeks to improve the customer experience for a broad swath of public services among 17 federal agencies — from filing taxes to managing federal health and retirement benefits — all of which can be enhanced quickly and cost-effectively using automation.

A growing number of government agencies, including the Social Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, IRS, GSA, Commerce, Department of Veterans Affairs, the U.S. Air Force, and many others are already leveraging automation not only for back-office financial and human resources work, but on the front lines to support their missions and augment their workforce. Among recent examples:

• Automation helped federal agents quickly screen information on tens of thousands of people fleeing the Afghanistan crisis to enable their safe travel out of the country.
• When forest fires peaked this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture used automation to help absorb the spike in demand for payroll, equipment orders and invoicing. Department officials recently estimated that automation from 66 bots helped avoid $5.3 million in costs and saved 155,989 hours per year that could be redeployed for other services.
• The IRS, which has been challenged to keep up with demands during the pandemic, used automation to help reduce the manual work of monitoring settlement agreements between taxpayers and small businesses, saving employees 26,800 hours that were put to use to meet other needs.

State agencies are also benefitting from automation platforms:

• During the height of the pandemic, one state agency saw its call center volume jump to five times what its staff could handle. Automation helped take the average call time of 18 minutes per customer and reduce it by 90%, by streamlining queries and eliminating manual activities.
• Another state deployed automation to process skyrocketing unemployment applications during the pandemic. By deploying an automation platform to process unemployment applications, agency employees were able to reduce processing times from an average of 15 minutes per applicant to 1.5 minutes per applicant — and significantly reduce human error rates in the process.
• Many states were overwhelmed by the rush for food support as the weekly number of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) applications nearly doubled nationwide. One state’s Department of Human Services deployed automation to manage the high demand and succeeded in reducing the total application processing time from 35 minutes, when done manually, to 15 minutes leveraging automation.

One of the challenges we’ve heard from our automation customers is determining what to automate next. To that end, we’re working with a growing number of organizations to automate process discovery, using task-mining techniques. This helps organizations analyze and quantify the return on investment of automating complex systems, such as large SAP implementations.

We’re also working with government agencies to improve workload capacity, productivity and cost savings, using automation with AI that, for example, can evaluate and process large volumes of imagery, handwritten, hardcopy and other unstructured data.

These capabilities — and the ease with which they can be deployed on top of an agency’s existing infrastructure and applications — are among just some of the reasons government agencies are to turning to UiPath’s automation platform. Another reason is how relatively easy these tools are for employees to learn and use. That gives employees greater empowerment while also helping them to complete routine and repetitive work faster, more productively, and with fewer errors.

But automation coupled with AI also brings other important advantages to agency operations. For example, automation can assemble and unify data across multiple applications, servers and cloud environments to support quicker decisions without having to necessarily invest in larger-scale software overhauls.

The use of advanced automation platforms offers government agencies a powerful way to improve services — and the customer experience — to their constituents and the public at large. At the same time, it also provides a smarter way to build workforce capacity and help employees to be more productive. And that benefits everyone.

Learn more about how advanced automation from UiPath can help your agency deliver more to citizens and accelerate your mission.

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The robots — or more accurately, robotic process automation (RPA) applications — are gaining widening adoption across government agencies, according to a new survey of federal and state government business, program and IT officials.

Read the full report.

More than 6 in 10 federal respondents — and 4 in 10 state respondents — in the survey said their agency now uses RPA technology to facilitate work. And it appears the momentum for using RPA technology is building quickly in government. Of those at agencies putting RPA to work, two-thirds have begun piloting, or deploying RPA within the last 12 months.

The findings are based on a new survey, completed by 167 prequalified executives at federal and state government agencies, responsible for their agencies’ business, program or enterprise operations, including IT, customer service and acquisition officials. The survey was conducted by FedScoop and StateScoop, with underwriting support from UiPath, a leading provider of RPA software solutions

Among other key findings:

• 6 in 10 federal respondents — and half of state respondents — view RPA as a building block to harnessing artificial intelligence and machine learning, by accelerating data gathering and improving data quality.
• RPA is being put to work in widening range of applications, including efforts to streamline data collection and processing, document management, identity verification and to respond automatically to citizens’ information requests.
• While the number of RPA applications varies according to agency size and experience, among respondents familiar with the numbers, half said their agency had developed or deployed more than 50 RPA robots as of the end of last year.
• 1 in 3 respondents said that RPA technology has saved between 5,000 and 50,000 hours of routine work, allowing employees to re-channel their time and efforts to more value-added areas of public service.

Because RPA requires little or no coding, and can be deployed with minimal training, it is relatively easy for employees to apply it successfully to automate all kinds of business processes and online services, according to James Walker, chief technology officer for public sector at UiPath.

The study suggests that once RPA’s benefits are demonstrated in one area, it opens up consideration for uses elsewhere.

But RPA also provides a way to help budget-constrained agencies boost capacity, observed Walker. “Automation can begin to liberate agency staff from repetitive, lower-valued — but necessary — work and enable them to focus on higher-valued tasks needed to achieve their mission.”

Read the full report, “RPA’s expanding role in government,” for the detailed findings, or contact automation@uipath.com to learn more about automating workflows.

 This article was produced by FedScoop and StateScoop and underwritten by UiPath.

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The Robotic Process Automation Governance Team within the Office of the CIO handles configuration management and cybersecurity vetting to standardize the credentialing of bots, while business analysts pick the automations.

Analysts need only fill out an RPA intake form, the first step of the governance process, which asks nine questions before calculating the necessary bot’s complexity and expected time savings.

“We’ve reached a point with our maturity where we’re really encouraging different business units to come to the table with their own ideas for automation,” said Jacob Feldman, program analyst at USPTO, during an ACT-IAC event Wednesday. “This is implementing a federated model of development.”

Initially, USPTO attempted to automate whatever project was proposed, often using bots with if-then scenario logic. But the agency has since learned that some RPA candidates are better than others, and bots reliant on yes-no logic or linear decision-making can be implemented faster, Feldman said.

USPTO built its intake form with Microsoft Power Apps by combining a bot complexity assessment from UiPath, which also supplies the agency with RPA licenses, with a different method from the federal RPA Community of Practice. The form helps select better RPA candidates and has already been shared with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Department of Commerce more broadly, Feldman said.

Rather than allow standalone bot licenses, USPTO automations must be done through orchestrator software. The orchestrator has different tenancies for each business unit so patent bots are classified in the patent tenancy.

Bots are developed in a formal qualification testing environment. This prevents rogue bots by thoroughly vetting them before deploying them to a quality assurance or production environment. Governance was set up this way after a mishap that required data cleanup, Feldman said.

The RPA Governance Team doesn’t permit unattended bots yet, as it hasn’t yet addressed the USPTO cyber team’s concerns. But solutions like SailPoint and CyberArk are being considered for giving bots active accounts in the agency directory. Cyber experts within each business unit will determine what’s best for the systems they secure, Feldman said.

USPTO’s Office of the CIO initially kept bot development in-house, but now business units are more actively addressing their needs. The Office of the Chief Financial Officer is using a mix of government and contract personnel to develop bots, while the trademarks business unit is currently acquiring contract support, Feldman said.

The trademarks unit is currently looking to automate suspension checks, where the trademark process is halted to determine if it conflicts with others. Trademark attorneys and their legal support staff assess thousands of trademarks in this way daily.

“This is something a bot can do,” Feldman said. “It can fly through and take a look at any type of associations and then make a determination about whether to re-suspend or remove from suspension.”

The business unit is also looking into one intelligent automation where a bot would scan trademarks and identify words in the dictionary. Then it would attempt to recognize more nuanced trademark names, like “Nice2CU,” and attempt to match those to dictionary words, despite the strange spelling.

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While these technology solutions are in the early stages of adoption, human input and, more importantly, institutional knowledge will be essential to ensuring the efficiency gains expected of AI and automation. And with some estimating that the government will need to reskill up to 300,000 federal employees during this AI boom, an early question for agency leaders will be how to introduce these new technologies that will transform future of public service?

“I think you’ve got to start first with what you are going to use it for,” said Meagan Metzger, CEO of Dcode, which helps emerging technology companies navigate entry into federal markets.

Metzger said the benefits of AI often break down into two categories: doing things that humans shouldn’t be doing, like labor-intensive administrative work, and doing things that humans can’t do, such as sifting through petabytes of data for potential solutions. Determining how agencies plan to use AI and how employees will work with it is an essential first step.

“I think first, it’s identifying which workforce you are actually going to affect with AI because, depending on how you get there, it’s very different,” Metzger said. “You are going to have to look at, once you assess your skill gaps, what tools do you actually need to enable them to train, which could be AI, or stuff like data science workbenches so people can collaborate.”

The Trump administration is actively pursuing both paths as part of its President’s Management Agenda, calling on agencies to adopt automated technologies that will allow federal employees to pursue more “high-value” work while also using it to better leverage troves of government data as an asset.

Making incremental introductions

One challenge of these reskilling efforts is that they are occurring amid a massive technological transformation in the federal government.

While agencies are also consolidating data centers, determining which services to migrate to the cloud and bolstering their cybersecurity posture, deciding how to introduce a workforce-changing technology like automation or AI can be a daunting task, especially with the pressure to catch up to the operations currently happening in the private sector.

“The challenge that I think a lot of agencies have is that they get paralyzed,” Metzger said. “[They think], ‘I need to do a complete infrastructure modernization, and I need to have an entire data management strategy complete before I can do any of those things,’ and that’s unfortunately not fast.”

She said the easier path for agencies to adopt automation is to identify small tasks to test the technology on and then scaling it up from there.

“Pick a business or a mission problem,” Metzger said. “The way that technology is structured now with cloud, you can start slowly, incrementally modernizing their environment. Maybe there’s a program that has a discrete set of data sources, you can modernize that and start moving that program to AI. Then, slowly start picking off the programs until you get to a total solution.”

The other advantage an incremental approach offers is that it allows agencies leaders to leverage small wins to cultivate a critical following rather than trying to institute a wholesale change, said Department of Transportation CIO Vicki Hildebrand, whose last day in government is Jan. 4.

“I think it goes back to those organic opportunities. You see an opportunity, you start with a baby step and I think that’s how you do it. Then you show success, then you’ve got a few more believers and then you have another opportunity,” she said. “All of a sudden, you have a stakeholder who has bought in and you’re not pitching it to somebody who’s half listening.”

Tasked with modernizing the technology infrastructure of a department that encompasses regulating air, rail and automotive travel, Hildebrand said her innovation successes often came by earning small wins and using their success to broaden their adoption.

“This is exactly the way IT loves to live,” she said. “When the stakeholders think there is a more modern technological way to help us and you grab those opportunities. Then you try to get the few people that are going to be the best to help that initiative move forward. Then they bring on a few people and then there’s a new opportunity.”

The Culture Question

Given the already competitive market for cyber, data science and IT talent, the Trump administration recently announced its plans to tap the federal workforce to plug critical skills gaps and prepare for the adoption automation technology through reskilling.

Federal CIO Suzette Kent recently announced the Federal Cybersecurity Reskilling Academy, as well as three pilot programs in 2019 to address technology skills gaps, leadership management and robotic process automation (RPA).

While those training programs could address reskilling efforts from a high level, ensuring that frontline employees will buy into such a transformation will likely determine whether the efforts can be sustained across the enterprise.

One way to generate “organic opportunities” is to take some of the workforce’s most labor-intensive tasks off the table. That’s why Hildebrand said she expects RPA to make a big splash in the federal government in 2019.

“You can remove so much manual work and improve quality by using RPA,” she said. “So I see a lot of that catching fire around some of the things that RPA is really good at. It’s not meant for everything, but the manual, repetitive, copy-paste kinds of activities, I would be surprised if there wasn’t a lot of that happening to free up resources for other things.

Hildebrand added: “The challenge on the heels of that, though, is now you have people who have been doing copy-paste for a long period of time and a robot is now doing that, you need programs to teach them other things.”

Using tech to build better human capital management

Agencies like the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service, the General Services Administration and other have tested RPA pilot programs in the last year, and its potential to make operations more efficient has officials looking to it as an early step in the government’s embrace of automation technology.

Jim Walker, director of public sector marketing at RPA vendor UiPath, said the technology doesn’t so much require reskilling as it does restructuring the work. And within that restructuring lies the opportunity for agencies to eliminate time-consuming tasks to pursue more workforce development.

“It’s not as if robotics is changing the workforce any different than the cell phone has, any different than the computer has,” said Walker, a former federal employee. “Whether it’s through the government, through a contractor employee or through their own home, retraining is not nearly the problem it was 15 or 20 years ago.”

The President’s Management Agenda has also called on the Office of Management and Budget and its Office of Federal Procurement Policy to tackle some of those reskilling challenges by developing new training methods for employees impacted by automation. The plan is expected in the second quarter of fiscal 2019.

Don Kettl, academic director of the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ Washington Center, said at the heart of the federal government’s technological revolution has to be a focus on also revolutionizing how it trains its employees to match.

“The reality is there’s no way to be able to make the most effective use of emerging technologies without having the most effective employees to know what to do with it,” he said. “The paradox is, at the core, the more we talk about the issues of technology, the more important the issues of human capital become.”

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This was the overarching impression left by enterprise robotic process automation (RPA) provider UiPath’s inaugural federal user conference, UiPath Together. The event Tuesday featured a veritable parade of speakers from customer federal agencies, each speaking, sometimes quite granularly, about how RPA is being used at their agencies, how the projects got started, what challenges they’ve faced and more.

But there’s an important caveat to note here too — most of these use cases are still quite new. Ed Burrows, senior adviser to the CFO and the General Services Administration, delivered this consumer warning, of sorts, at the start his keynote. “My presentation is very positive,” he told the gathered crowed. But it’s early days — “just to let you know, we’re in the honeymoon period,” he added.

Burrows said the RPA project being run in his office is projected to have a huge return on investment in terms of employee work hours saved. And he’s not the only one excited about the potential — when the office looked for volunteers to test the software, it received 45 applications, ultimately choosing 10 to partake in an initial online training, Burrows said.

GSA wasn’t the only happy customer at UiPath Together. The U.S. Postal Service is also running an RPA pilot that Maura McDevitt, the agency’s controller, came to talk about. The bot, which was launched in January, collects missing information about packages four times as fast as a human worker can.

Over at the Defense Information Systems Agency, leaders held a “race the bot” challenge in the office — pitting a new bot (pilot launched in December 2017) against an experienced and talented human employee. In 15 minutes, Chief of Accounting Operations and Compliance Division Barbara Crawford said, the bot was able to pull 150 relevant accounting documents while the human was able to pull just two.

“The whole team is so energized and excited,” Crawford said.

Brian Reid, representing NASA, spoke briefly about George Washington, the federal government’s first bot.

The event heavily skewed toward speakers on the finance and business side of the agencies rather than IT. McDevitt from USPS said she chose to run the bot pilot in her office because the process the bot is automating is a central business process, not an IT process. That said, she added, it’s important that IT and security be involved.

This wasn’t the only piece of advice meted out Tuesday.

It’s comforting, when trying something new, to know you’ve got a few friends who have walked a given road before. And this, it turns out, applies just as easily to deployment of RPA software in the federal government as it might to various personal life milestones — much of UiPath Together resembled a live-action advice column: Get leadership support, speakers advised. Start small! And whatever you do — don’t automate a fundamentally bad process. Because despite all the promise of RPA, Burrows quipped, you wouldn’t want to end up “freeing people up to find more things to do inefficiently.”

Artificial intelligence and machine learning, of which robotic process automation is one early stage, were part of FedScoop’s top emerging technologies of 2018 list.

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