Page 22 - Federal Computer Week, March/April 2019

Artificial Intelligence
RPA and the
‘automation first’ mindset
Robotic process automation is a powerful way for agencies to start investing in AI
Jim Walker
Federal CTO and Director of Public- Sector Marketing, UiPath
In addition to GSA, the IRS, National Background Investigations Bureau, Naval Air Systems Command and others are reporting that bots are helping them reallocate thousands of staff hours to higher-value work, perform hours’ worth
of manual work in a matter of minutes, onboard new employees in hours instead of days and save enough money to allow RPA programs to be self-funded.
All that progress happened in a single year. 2019 is poised to be the year when agency leaders adopt an “automation first” mindset to support digital transformation and offer more efficient and effective citizen services.
It’s the year when executives will ask, “Why isn’t that being automated?”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE HAS a
key role to play in agencies’ digital transformation efforts, and robotic process automation is a natural starting point. RPA can incorporate many technologies that are critical for digital transformation, and in particular, it can help agencies deliver better customer experiences by seamlessly working across multiple user interfaces on multiple platforms.
RPA takes over necessary processes
— highly transactional, rules-based yet low-valued work — that have typically
been performed by humans, and it is most successful when the process owners create the automation modules, which are then combined to build a completely new end-to- end workflow.
Interestingly, we see a significant number of agency leaders from the business side adopting UiPath’s RPA technology. That is good news for IT-led transformation efforts, which can sometimes lag when those in charge of business operations are not actively involved.
Now that the Trump administration has announced the American AI Initiative, agencies can use their investment in RPA
as a down payment on the research and development called for under the initiative. Agencies that delay adopting AI forgo the opportunity to reduce operational costs, increase capacity, eliminate backlogs, improve compliance and allow people to stop working as robots for their computers. Instead, employees can dig more deeply into customer issues, conduct more insightful analysis and improve citizen engagement.
Agency pioneers leading the way
At UiPath, we have been seeing a growing interest in RPA across the government. Last year, the NASA Shared Services Center
and the Defense Logistics Agency led the way with creative, secure pilot projects
that gave their bots the credentials to perform cross-platform and cross-domain work. DLA combined “cloud first” with “automation first” when it deployed RPA into a Microsoft Azure environment.
The General Services Administration continues its leadership role with a crucial effort to help other agencies understand how to start an RPA program. GSA is also facilitating discussions about the role of Centers of Excellence in scaling and sustaining such programs.
davooda/Shutterstock/FCW Staff
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