Page 11 - FCW, March/April 2018

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION MAXIMIZES RESOURCES
Intelligent Automation Brings E ciency to Agencies
IA delivers agility to help agencies meet new digital initiatives, maximize resources, and reduce operational costs.
The list of demands on a government CIO’s desk grows longer every day. Digital transformation promises to make government leaner, more efficient, and nimble, but many agencies struggle to take advantage of new technologies.
They have to rely on legacy systems and outdated business processes to fulfill their mission as increasing regulations drag down productivity. Departments often lack the personnel and funding needed to retool and keep up with user demands.
Help is available in the form of Intelligent Automation (IA), which offers harried government officials a way to streamline tedious, inefficient business processes. “By adding IA to their toolbox, it empowers departments
to dramatically improve productivity,” says Kirke Everson, managing director and government Intelligent Automation lead at KPMG. Employees can spend less time on routine, manually-intensive processes, such
as completing forms, and have more time for strategic initiatives, such as servicing customers.
Industry researcher Gartner expects one IA segment, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), to grow at a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 41 percent and reach $1 billion in revenue in 2020. Clearly, many are seeing the benefits of implementing IA technology to automate repetitive tasks.
SURVEY THE LANDSCAPE
Today’s government executives are seeing their workloads expand in both size and complexity. Data volumes are increasing dramatically. By 2025, the world will have accumulated 180 zettabytes (ZB) of data, up
from 44 ZBs in 2020 and 10 ZBs in 2015, according to market research firm International Data Corp. The number of devices users work with is constantly growing. Compliance regulations increase and place more demands on IT systems, and security threats change daily. As the to-do list grows, IT budgets have grown by only a few percentage points at best. In most cases, they’ve remained stagnant or even been reduced. Many see the need to work differently.
CIOs find themselves trying to meet growing demands with limited resources. IA can boost agency productivity without increasing expenses. Government agencies can use IA to streamline business processes, improve efficiency, respond to new demands more quickly and reduce costs.
So how does it work? Intelligent Automation is a suite of solutions that deliver a range of functionality. RPA focuses on automating mundane, routine tasks that employees prefer not to do. It then redirects their efforts to more satisfying work requiring human judgment and experience. Cognitive tools ingest massive amounts of data, then look for patterns, make decisions more quickly than humans, and dramatically boost productivity.
Intelligent Automation’s low cost, non-invasive capabilities help government agencies tackle projects previously thought to be too complex or costly. The solutions are flexible and can be deployed on a small
or enterprise scale. On the basic automation side of
the IA spectrum, the tools automate routine items, like repetitive data entry. On the more cognitive side of
the spectrum, they highlight anomalies and provide recommendations for corrective actions. The technology also scales to meet fluctuating workloads.
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