Page 72 - FCW, November/December 2019

FCWPerspectives
approach rather than silos.”
Another participant agreed, saying: “Our leaders are now
used to the word ‘automation,’ and they believe in it. This is a cross-agency priority with sustained leadership, and they are actually involved and invested in trying to improve business processes. Everyone — government and industry and all of us in our private lives — is moving more and more toward massive amounts of data. And it’s not going to slow down.”
“We didn’t go after RPA and machine learning because it was a buzzword, ” another speaker said. “We had to do something because we’re constantly losing resources and funding. We’re expected to do more with less. And so we have to come up with a more creative way to do what we couldn’t do before and do it better. In some cases, RPA is the only way.”
“You also run into the interconnectedness of all these things,” another executive added. “When one node goes down and it causes your entire enterprise to go down, you don’t have time to wait for somebody to step in and figure out what’s going on. Those are the kinds of things that we’re focusing on.”
‘Figuring out what shouldn’t be automated’
There was a lively discussion about taking advantage of the opportunity to evaluate and improve processes before automating them.
“Several years ago when the executive order on reducing the size of the federal government came out, I realized there
was no way we were going to be able to even come close to meeting that financial target,” one executive said. “So I convened my teams and said, ‘We don’t have the option of saying we can’t deliver the service so let’s come up with the attributes for an idealized system. What would it look like?’ And one of the things that we discovered is that focus- ing on individual administrative processes is a bad mistake because it is a single function. And it’s one of many things that everyone does.”
To solve the problem, the participant added, “we began by thinking of our employees as customers. There are 2 million of them around government, and I think they are really the forgotten bunch. We tried to look at it from their perspective.”
Others also said that finding the right balance between people, process and technology is a key element of any auto- mation effort. One executive described an effort to automate a business process that was spreadsheet-based. “We started out thinking it was pretty straightforward. But then we looked at the data. It was coming from different systems and it was conflicting, it was in different formats, pieces were missing. We had to back down and say, ‘We’ll automate the things that work well, and the user is going to be integrated sys- tematically to fix things that automation will never be able to solve because the data is so poor.’ That was the way we got acceptance.”
“Once we’ve identified an idea, we start small, do a proof of concept, demonstrate the value, and see the feasibility of the technology and the business processes,” another execu-
70 November/December 2019 FCW.COM