Page 12 - FCW, March/April 2018

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION MAXIMIZES RESOURCES
What Type of Intelligent Automation Meets Your Needs?
Intelligent Automation (IA) describes a variety of technologies that streamline business process. KPMG divides the market into three types of tools: Class 1, Class 2, and Class 3.
• Class 1: Class 1 centers on Robotic Process Automation (RPA) where routine, clerical processes such as cutting and pasting data from one form to another are automated. The software runs either attended or unattended by virtual machines in the background. These solutions are often available as stand-alone solutions. Class 1 tools often serve as a good starting point for an agency’s IA journey.
• Class 2: For agencies ready to move up the IA food chain, Class 2 solutions feature cognitive automation. This class includes technologies like Natural Language Processing (NLP), that address complex transactions, require a deep level of analytics, and work with both structured and unstructured data. One example is using a bot on an agency website to help citizens find information through text or voice chat.
• Class 3: The highest level of sophistication is Class 3, which features reasoning cognitive automation. These solve problems using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and NLP. This
is suitable for agencies working with large volumes of unstructured and structured data. If Class 1 mimics a human’s arms and legs, then Class 3 mimics the brain, making decisions and generating recommendations. These solutions solve highly complex problems, such as assimilating multiple data sources and feeds into a common environment and trying to determine where threats may be occurring or could potentially occur.
Agencies have to understand the different categories when making their deployment decisions. They don’t want to over-engineer or under-engineer the solution. With the former, they could incur unnecessary expenses. With the latter, they may have difficulty scaling to meet application demands. They need to find the technology that fits just right.
WHERE TO APPLY IA?
Over the years, agencies have developed complex business processes. These processes are often document intensive and involve completing and routing various forms. With IA, agencies can orchestrate and automate that workflow.
IA can work throughout the agency and automate front, middle, and back-office functions. In the back office, finance and human resources departments provide administrative support and payment services.
Consequently, finance represents a great place for agencies to start dabbling with IA. Finance data is structured and workflows are rules-based. For instance, accounts receivable departments produce monthly aging reports. Employees spend considerable time entering data, copying records from one format to another, and examining numbers to find potential inconsistencies. With IA, bots input data, reconcile records, perform calculations, compare numbers, highlight inconsistencies, and make recommendations.
Federal agencies employ more than 2 million workers throughout the United States. During the year, human resource departments constantly hire new employees. Using IA, HR professionals can offload many of the repetitive tasks associated with onboarding and spend more of their time trying to ensure the department attracts and retains the best talent.
In front offices, employees interact with the public, provide them with information or deliver agency services. Over the years, the available communication channels have grown considerably. Face-to-face and telephone communications have been augmented with web interactions, mobile communications, and now social media. IA relies on recent technical advances to improve and streamline such communications. Natural Language Processing (NLP) and chat bots provide intelligent interaction. They deliver friendly, intuitive, and multi- channel interaction and content from many different information sources and systems.
Middle offices draw on the resources of the front and back offices. “Middle office solutions require a lot of collaboration from multiple stakeholders,” says Michael Caporusso, Intelligent Automation solution director at KPMG. Internal groups act as monitors and perform certain functions, such as ensuring compliance and managing IT resources. Many agencies now use RPA
Sponsored Content