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and chat bots to automate password resets, so help desk personnel can spend their time on more challenging problems.
IA chat bots and back-office integration are also changing the customer experience. Government agencies are increasingly deploying multi-channel solutions. Individuals start off with information on the web and work their way to contacting an agency representative if needed.
IA IN ACTION
Government agencies are now realizing the benefits of adopting IA technology. Here are a few examples of the time and cost savings they are experiencing:
• KPMG is working with a federal agency that has reduced its travel request process to a single step. As a result, work that took six- to eight hours is now done in less than one hour.
• KPMG is working with a federal agency to automate the generation of daily aging reports and e-mailing them on a timely basis to affected recipients.
• KPMG is working with a state agency to automate additional end-to-end regression testing scenarios of their applications prior to production deployment.
• KPMG is working with a federal agency to automate time sensitive, repetitive and mundane processes
that would not just free up time but relieve staff from working with sensitive data that would have conflicted them from other duties.
• Another agency ingests 50,000 five- to 100+-page PDF files. Previously, employees had to identify and extract all relevant reporting information and put it in the correct format. Now, with KPMG’s help, bots do most of that work. Consequently, the time required to process an average file was reduced from 45 minutes to less than three minutes.
• A state contract management agency has a limited team of skilled lawyers who review contracts from stakeholders and ensure they comply with agency rules. With KPMG’s help, an IA application relying on NLP and machine learning capabilities can review the contracts and present only possible exceptions to the legal team so that they can audit more contracts and focus on the exceptions.
• Another agency working with KPMG receives royalties based on how other organizations use its services. The users self-report their usage levels, however, the agency lacked sufficient personnel to complete audits for all
users. Now an IA solution triages data sources and identifies customers who may be underreporting their use of the department’s resources, so they come closer to 100 percent compliance.
A growing number of agencies are seeing significant reductions in contact center expenses because of IA.
The average cost of an agent servicing a call is several dollars. That number drops to less than a dollar with IA. For specific scenarios, it has shown a reduction of over 95 percent in both time and cost.
So, how should an agency begin its IA journey? Start small. Automobile manufacturers are not waiting for every driverless car technology challenge to be solved before launching their services. They now deliver functions, like automated parallel parking and lane departure alerts. So agencies don’t have to have all their desired IA features perfected in their first roll out. Instead, begin with something simple, repetitive, and that will easily benefit from automation, like monthly financial reports.
Collaboration is also a critical factor. IT managers
need to realize IA can bring jarring changes for their agencies. Because IA touches on more than technology issues, leaders from across an agency need to participate in the planning. Government often starts by establishing advisory committees on automation, build proofs-of- concept to determine their return on investment, and then develop IA roadmaps.
“As progress is made, agencies form centers of excellence”, says Payam Mousavi, Intelligent Automation director at KPMG. This group helps ensure consistent implementation across department boundaries, develop best practices, and piggyback on lessons learned from various groups on their IA journeys.
IA technology has only recently matured, and is now well positioned to help government agencies maximize their resources. By deploying IA technology, government can streamline business processes, improve productivity, reduce errors, and cut expenses.
For more information, visit kpmg.com/us/govautomation
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