Page 35 - Federal Computer Week, January/February 2019

Automating the citizen experience
IT modernization is about more than replacing aging equipment. It’s also about adopting cutting-edge technology to better serve government customers of all kinds.
IBY STEPHANIE KANOWITZ
mproving customer service is an imperative for government agencies as evidenced by the goals of the President’s Management Agenda and the National Association of State CIOs’ top 10 priorities list for 2019. To accomplish that goal, agencies are turn-
ing to emerging tools such as chatbots, virtual assistants and robotic process automation (RPA). The tools have a wide range of applications. Chatbots are among the most common, although the three are interconnected. “Short for ‘chat robot,’ a chatbot is a computer program that simulates human conversation, or chat, through artificial intelligence,” according to DigitalGov. gov. Chatbots conduct conversations via audi- tory or textual methods and ultimately answer users’ questions or link them to the people or
resources that can.
Although building a chatbot takes consider-
able work in terms of cleaning and organizing data, adding metadata tags, and tying the data to natural language processing and other technol- ogy, the benefits can be substantial. They include the ability to integrate and manage vast amounts of data from multiple sources, identify patterns based on customer interactions and reduce the amount of time employees spend on “mundane tasks,” said Adelaide O’Brien, a research director at IDC Government Insights. The result is better engagement with citizens and employees.
Among their many advantages, bots can assist customers any time of the day or night. In addi- tion, “bots can ask questions about individuals’ needs, habits, and preferences and offer contex- tual and personalized services based on a combi- nation of constituent-supplied data and data from other sources,” O’Brien said.
And by allowing agencies to more efficiently process vast amounts of data, chatbots “reduce the need for employees to perform repetitive
tasks, such as [answering] questions regarding services, qualification for benefits and eligibility for refunds,” she added. That frees employees to engage in more complex problem-solving and decision-making.
For example, the NASA Shared Services Center at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi uses a bot to streamline employee workloads, including those of the CIO and chief financial officer. The fee-for-service organization — which provides agencywide services related to human resources, procurement, financial management, data centers and service desks — launched the federal gov- ernment’s first digital bot in 2017. Named George Washington, the bot assists with human resources and procurement processes.
The bot has its own email account and the nec- essary credentials to access operational systems. “Whether Washington ingests structured emails to create tickets for new employee suitability adjudication or logs into the financial manage- ment software to enter human-approved budget information, it acts and looks to employees like any other employee who reads and processes emails, looks for new files in group folders, pro- vides feedback in real time when exceptions to work instructions are encountered and reports all of its work upon completion,” O’Brien said.
NSSC has since added the John Adams bot for finance-related work and the Pioneer bot, which creates procurement requests for the Office of the CIO. Officials plan to launch a fourth bot, Beacon, this year.
Talking up chatbots
Van Baker, a research vice president on Gartner’s Application Innovation team, said the government is still in the early stages of embracing chatbots. Based on recent research, “only about 10 percent of enterprises have production chatbots in deploy-
January/February 2019 FCW.COM 35