The launch of the bot comes amid a push across federal government to use robotic process automation to streamline agency processes. It will automate the currently manual process of paying invoices every month and updating budget lines items needed to pay invoices to customers or vendors. 

“It’s the first time we’re actually automating something through robotic process automation. So that’s what makes it so innovative for us is because the bureau doesn’t have bots right now, we were just sort of like putting our toes in that world,” Peter Sursi, head of finance modernization, accounts payable and relocation services said at the Adobe Government Forum in Washington on Tuesday. “So for us to get one on the finance side for us is pretty exciting. It’ll save us a lot of labor hours.” 

The tool would affect all 56 FBI field offices and approximately 250 task force officers that process the financial payments within those offices as well as FBI customers who get paid through the invoices which were previously manual processed and time intensive.

Sursi said the new finance bot was created in the past two months and is in final stages of testing, which has energized his team to create a longer list of FBI finance projects that could be automated and made much faster thanks to bot automation.

In March, State Department CIO Kelly Fletcher revealed that her agency had used robotic process automation to cut the processing time for its monthly financial statement from two months to two days.

Speaking at FedScoop’s ITModTalks, Fletcher said financial reporting was one of several areas where the agency is using AI to improve the efficiency of back-office operations, which has the ability to substantially improve reporting processes because of State’s federated structure and global operations.

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GSA consolidated 24 schedules for finding and purchasing solutions into one Multiple Award Schedule for agencies on Oct. 1 of last year and began updating pre-existing contracts to meet the new terms and conditions, by way of the Mass Mod, in February.

Contractors that fail to accept the Mass Mod will have their offerings removed from GSA’s eTools platform, while those that have are already reaping the benefits, said Jessica Salmoiraghi, associate administrator of the Office of Governmentwide Policy, on Monday.

She cited an example: An information technology contractor working with a manufacturer to make hospital air filters approached the Federal Acquisition Service within GSA about adding the product to its offerings to assist with coronavirus pandemic response.

“Since the IT contractor had already accepted the Mass Modification, they could easily add the product to their contract and deliver the product via prime-sub relationship,” Salmoiraghi said during a Professional Services Council virtual conference. “Prior to the consolidation, the hospital air filter manufacturer would have had to go through the offer process for a different contract for air filters, so it’s really shortening that timeline.”

As Phase 2 of MAS consolidation continues, GSA is looking to automate parts of the contracting process to make it “less cumbersome,” Salmoiraghi added.

GSA began testing a new use case for its Truman bot, designed in 2019 to automatically review new contractors based on the MAS, in January. The bot is automating the new offer review process by checking the excluded parties list and pre-filling templates.

Already Truman has processed more than 1,000 MAS offers, saving 1,300 hours of staff time between January and June.

“We’ve been leaning forward into bots not just here, in this particular example, but also in terms of time management, in terms of lease changes,” Salmoiraghi said.

The MAS solicitation is organized into 12 large categories, which are divided into subcategories and Special Item Numbers (SINs) — reduced from 800 to 300 for clarity. 

A third and final phase of MAS Consolidation is slated for the second half of fiscal 2020.

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Deloitte Consulting works with agencies to identify the right RPA software for them, and every quarter principal Marc Mancher measures their bot counts.

The past 12 months Mancher said he expected agencies to move from a few bots to commercial scale, and so he was “a little disappointed” with only a 20 percent uptick between quarters. Instead, more often Mancher found agencies had scaled horizontally into new use cases.

“I’ve seen RPA solicitations on the street. So we’ve matured as a business from risk and compliance, security credentialing, innovation to having more places horizontally scaled,” he said. “And I’m hoping in the next 12 months — as I’m now seeing more in the marketplace — for us to get vertical scale in the federal government.”

Agencies didn’t rush to scale up because doing so requires putting controls in place via centers of excellence for reskilling and performance measurement, Mancher added.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Deputy Chief Financial Officer Lynn Moaney oversees a program that built the agency’s first bots and is now focused on reskilling employees moving from low- to high-value work and building out the digital labor ecosystem.

Digital labor must also be credentialed for agencies to track its actions.

“If you focus on ‘How do I do it with one bot?’ and not ‘when I get to 1,000 bots,’ then you might build your ecosystem wrong,” Mancher said. “You don’t need to put all the building blocks in place, but you do need to be cognizant when you scale.”

The Food and Drug Administration has been a “trailblazer” in the RPA space, he added. Drug-intake forms have been automated, as has some work within the CFO’s office.

Bots aren’t just about improved process or cost savings, Mancher said.

Deloitte was also involved with building a bot for the Department of Defense that maps keystrokes and creates morning reports in a Tableau dashboard. Previously DOD looked at such data once a month, and the bot only took six hours to make.

In May, Federal CIO Suzette Kent said agencies should reinvest their savings from RPA in other information technology projects via working capital funds. Those savings are now being tracked by an RPA community of practice created by the General Services Administration.

The Defense Logistics Agency recently finished an RPA proof-of-concept allowing unattended bots to operate around the clock.

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RPA is software that mimics the keystrokes and mouse actions of workers to automate transactional tasks and processes — like moving name and location information from a spreadsheet to an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. DLA estimates RPA will save its employees about 50,000 hours in its first year by taking over routine functions.

But until now, most agencies have used attended bots given credentials from the laptop of the person they’re working with — as long as they’re on the clock.

“We want bots to run 24 hours a day,” John Lockwood, RPA program manager at DLA, told FedScoop. “And we need the bots to have access when the individual isn’t there.”

But for the last 10 years, “we’ve been anti-bot,” Lockwood added.

Office of Management and Budget memo 18-23 and President Trump’s proposed 2020 budget proposal direct agencies to use RPA, and Federal CIO Suzette Kent has launched reskilling efforts to address the impacts of automation on the workforce.

The Department of Defense relies on public key infrastructure (PKI) to verify that an employee is accessing its network, and some sites are common access card (CAC) enabled. Other agencies use personal identity verification (PIV) cards instead.

The IT had to be tweaked so unattended bots could make use of PKI to access CAC-enabled sites — a “big challenge” that took nine months to surmount, Lockwood said. Essentially, the bot had to be duplicated to have its own persona and access.

On May 6, DLA successfully had an unattended bot run on its own certification by reaching out to the agency’s ERP system, where it has an account, to receive its own credentials granting it access. The use case involved UiPath’s RPA platform and SafeNet’s hardware.

The proof of concept paves the way for full implementation of RPA across agencies, which can choose to use an unattended or attended bot based on the work.

“Not only are we replacing processes with robots, but new processes are coming on board,” Lockwood said.

DLA automated five processes in six weeks to help handle all the data associated with standing up G-Invoicing, the Department of the Treasury’s solution for money transfers between agencies.

The agency also created a bot to clean up spreadsheets so names of employees are standardized during onboarding and computer access can be more easily granted.

RPA will help DLA respond to audit requests because, when a bot grabs information, all the steps are logged with time stamps, Lockwood said.

Lockwood said a lot of agencies have created attended bots using individuals’ CACs. DLA intends to release a white paper in the next couple months allowing those agencies to use its RPA solution to operationalize unattended bots and will be sharing use cases and code, he added.

Long term, DLA is looking at areas where getting information was “just too human intensive” but a bot could do the work cheaper and with faster computing power, Lockwood said.

“Finally, we expect to see bots be a tool to utilize our management system and to utilize future artificial intelligence,” he said.

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OPM’s idea, as suggested in a new request for information, is to acquire natural language processing technology “to gain insights into statutory and regulatory text to support policy analysis.” OPM has oversight over personnel policies, programs and operations across all civilian agencies.

The agency is looking for industry vendors that can provide such a capability, which should also include “topic modeling; text categorization; text clustering; information extraction; named entity resolution; relationship extraction; sentiment analysis; and summarization,” and “may include statistical techniques that can provide a general understanding of the statutory and regulatory text as a whole.”

It’s a tool that could improve the ability of OPM personnel to make policy decisions by freeing them up from the burden of reading through dull and often difficult-to-read government regulations. OPM also proposes taking that a step further by calling for additional information on bots and process automation, suggesting that even non-technical employees could build them.

“OPM seeks to learn more about chatbots and transactional bots that are easy to implement and customize with the goal of extending bot-building capabilities to non-IT employees,” the RFI says.

Though requirements are limited in the RFI, OPM asks that vendors provide a rough estimate of costs, schedule, efforts and risks.

The agency asks for responses by April 19. The solicitation is run out of OPM’s Office of the CIO, led by new CIO Clare Martorana.

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While some bills didn’t make the cut, here are a few FedScoop has been tracking that were signed into law during 2016 or were headed to the president at the end of the year.

H.R. 5877 – the U.S.-Israel Advanced Research Partnership Act of 2016

Signed into law Dec. 16, the bill was one of two introduced in July after Reps. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, and Jim Langevin, D-R.I., visited Israel on a congressional delegation focused on key cybersecurity issues facing both countries, such as protecting power grids from hackers.

The law will “enhance cybersecurity for the United States and Israel, putting us on a shared path toward innovative solutions to the threats we face,” said Langevin, co-founder and co-chairman of the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus.

The U.S.-Israel Advanced Research Partnership Act will expand a successful binational research and development program at the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency to include cybersecurity technologies. This collaboration between DHS and the Israeli Ministry of Public Security helps new products through the “valley of death” from basic and early-phase applied research to successful commercialization.

[Read more: One of two U.S.-Israel cybersecurity cooperation bills signed]

S. 3183, BOTS Act of 2016

Using bots or other technology to manipulate ticket-selling websites is now illegal under a bill signed into law Dec. 15.

The measure is designed to curb price inflation on the secondary market for tickets to see concerts, theater, sports and other events. Scalpers have been known to use bots to swamp ticket-selling sites as a way of dodging limits on purchases or other rules set by sellers.

The Federal Trade Commission and individual states will have the power to investigate and penalize offenders.

The White House says the new law “prohibits the circumvention of control measures used by Internet ticket sellers to ensure equitable consumer access to tickets for certain events.” It was signed by the president Dec. 15.

“These bots have gotten completely out of control and their dominance in the market is denying countless fans access to shows, concerts, and sporting events and driving prices through the roof,” Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., one of the bill’s original cosponsors, said in a statement. “With this soon to be new law that will eliminate ‘bots’ and slap hackers with a hefty fine, we can now ensure those who want to attend shows in the future will not have to pay outrageous, unfair prices.”

The bill would also make it illegal to knowingly resell tickets acquired through the use of bots or similar means.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the award-winning musical “Hamilton,” was a huge supporter of the bill.

[Read more: New tech bills make for busy week on the Hill]

H.R. 4904 – MEGABYTE Act of 2016

Signed into law on July 29, Rep. Matt Cartwright’s MEGABYTE Act aims to curtail unnecessary software spending in government.

The law “tasks the Office of Management and Budget and chief information officers to keep inventories of software licenses, train their IT management workforce on how to manage software licenses, and use the software license information to manage the agency’s software licenses in accordance with agency policy,” according to a news release from Cartwright, a Democrat from Pennsylvania.

“Cost savings and cost avoidance on software would be released in public reports,” the release also notes.

Cartwright said the goal was to improve efficiency in the federal government, “and sometimes it’s surprising the places you find an opportunity.” There is “considerable waste in software license expenditures,” he said.

The federal government spends about $80 billion a year on IT, and several recent efforts, like the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act, have endeavored to curb waste. OMB announced in June it would require agencies to remove redundant licenses and appoint a software manager within 45 days.

The MEGABYTE Act would dovetail some of the reforms in FITARA, Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas said on the House Floor in June.

“It’s simple, it’s straightforward, and it makes sense,” Hurd said of Cartwright’s bill.

[Read more: House passes ‘Megabyte Act’ to increase oversight of software licensing]

S. 3084 – American Innovation and Competitiveness Act

A bipartisan bill designed to streamline research and development of technology and expand participation in science cleared Congress on Dec. 16. President Obama had not yet signed it as of publication.

The bill generally is geared toward programs at the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Science and Technology. The measure “maximizes basic research opportunities, reduces administrative burdens for researchers, encourages scientific entrepreneurship, and promotes oversight of taxpayer-funded research,” according to a news release from sponsor Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo.

A sizable portion of the legislation orders agencies to make grants or create working groups geared toward increasing the participation of women and other underrepresented populations in STEM fields. It also urges federal agencies to consider crowdsourcing and collaborative science with ordinary citizens.

Gardner said that in clearing the bill, Congress had “made science bipartisan again.”

“We’ve worked for more than 18 months with the scientific community, industry, universities, and other interested stakeholders to craft a bill that reflects the needs of America’s science and technology enterprise and I will continue to work to ensure their needs are addressed in Congress,” Gardner said.

The legislation is important because it will improve “the process by which federally funded knowledge creation leads to actual innovation and U.S. jobs,” said Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, in a written statement.

The bill orders the White House’s National Science and Technology Council to coordinate federal research on high-energy physics, and it also asks NIST to research future cybersecurity needs such as cryptography resistant to quantum computing.

The bill does not include specific funding authorizations for NSF and NIST. A version approved by the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee in June proposed a 4 percent increase in the agencies’ authorizations for fiscal 2017 and fiscal 2018 for the two agencies.

[Read more: Senate Commerce Committee approves technology research policy bill; Bill on research policy seeks to engage women, minorities]

S. 337 – FOIA Improvement Act of 2016

Signed into law in June, the law “places the burden on agencies to justify withholding information, instead of on the requester to justify release,” according to a press release from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The bill, which is the biggest addition to the Freedom Of Information Act since since the open-government law was signed by President Lyndon Johnson 50 years ago, will codify policy memorandums Obama put out on his first day of office.

Additionally, the bill will create a centralized FOIA request website, which will allow people to find the right office to request information from, track requests online and figure out if the information they want has already been publicly released. The White House will also examine a standard of “release to one is to release to all,” which would direct agencies to proactively post their FOIA responses online.

“The Freedom of Information Act is one of the key ways in which citizens are able to find out what exactly is going on in government,” Obama said just prior to signing.

[Read more: Obama signs FOIA Improvement Act into law; FOIA bill heads to Obama’s desk]

Contact Samantha via email at samantha.ehlinger@fedscoop.com, or follow her on Twitter at @samehlinger. Subscribe to the Daily Scoop for stories like this in your inbox every morning by signing up here: fdscp.com/sign-me-on.

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