By Arun Balasubramanian, Vice President and Managing Director India and South Asia, UiPath
The post-COVID-19 outlook towards work is significantly different from its pre-pandemic counterpart, and the global workspace dynamic has changed manifolds. An example of this is the rampant digitisation across the private sector, and the upskilling and reskilling of workers to handle more digital work in a newly formed hybrid workspace.
The same is happening on a much smaller scale in the public sector, with growing expectations from the public for governments to invest more in technology and offer digital-first experiences. With citizens in India more digitally engaged than ever now, governments, education institutes, and utilities providers are expected to deliver citizen digital services that can match the digital native businesses they interact with daily.
In their daily work, the public sector typically deals with large amounts of manual, repetitive administrative tasks, which can take valuable time away from strategic work. In this aspect, software automation can be a game changer in improving public service delivery, enhancing experiences for the public, and increasing civil servants’ bandwidth for more meaningful efforts.
Having robust digital capabilities, both from a services perspective and as a collective workforce is also critical in boosting economic growth today. A new IDC survey commissioned by UiPath revealed that 88% of organisations in India view automation as a critical requirement for critical requirement for business excellence, customer experience, and competitive success in the next three years. With the private sector accelerating automation to roll out digital products, services, and experiences, it has become imperative for governments to likewise encourage digital upskilling and reskilling to keep pace.
At the same time, ongoing cyberattacks on governments and the utilities sector underpin the importance of comprehensive digital capabilities. Governments need to be able to react swiftly under such threats, to ensure that vital services stay online, and citizens are kept safe.
Overcoming hurdles to public sector automation
While automation adoption in this sector has been largely negligible in the past, owing to the stringent nature of public sector organisations and inherent resistance to change, the benefits can be realized quickly and seamlessly.
Take for example the University of Auckland, New Zealand, which offers services to more than 40,000 students, supported by 13,000 staff members. When it started looking at robotic process automation (RPA) for cost savings, the efforts quickly moved to redesign processes to improve efficiency. The initial workloads were around the student transcript request process, the finance team’s supply setup process, the purchase order setup process, the university’s compliance checks, the purchase order system, and new supplier requests. Benefits included 23,000 hours saved annually, a 96% success rate for orchestration across all processes, and a 98% client satisfaction rate for automation in finance.
Capturing the automation advantage in the long-term
To leverage and scale automation in the public sector, as the University of Auckland has done, governments must prioritise upskilling, as well as data sharing. Enabling shared data within public sector organisations will greatly improve efficiency and reduce tedious bureaucratic processes which citizens struggle to understand in this digital age.
Amidst this focus on digital resilience within the public sector, the conversation around automation has also shifted from just RPA to Intelligent Process Automation (IPA). This is to achieve comprehensive end-to-end process automation at scale instead of only focused automation through RPA. According to IDC, it is estimated that governments globally will combine trusted data sharing and IPA to provide 25% of government services proactively by 2024. This means that in the next few years, most bureaucracy will be invisible to constituents, while digital transformation, automation and AI will come to the foreground as the public sector displays greater flexibility and agility to respond to crises.
With the digitisation of processes, there is also an increasing need for upskilling and reskilling of workers and an increase in job roles involving technological knowledge. Therefore, the government must collaborate with the private sector, educational institutions, and societies to create a future-ready digital workforce.
Automation for success
The process of automation involves several steps to achieve success and an experienced partner can make the process much more efficient. IPA software is an integrated system that goes far beyond just RPA, by combining process automation platforms, capture applications, integration, API management software, messaging and event streaming software, rules-based decision automation, streaming decision automation, process mining, and modeling and architectural tools. Business leaders can use automation experts as an ecosystem enablers, to help simplify the process of IPA implementation, by providing an end-to-end platform for automation that combines RPA, artificial intelligence, process and task mining, cloud, API integration, and analytics capabilities whilst providing the governance, security, scalability, and performance that enterprises require.
Automation strategies must be holistic, scalable, and long-term, therefore requiring a digital thinking mindset. Real transformation can only come with long-term resolve and an invested team with the right expertise from external partners. This way, government and public sector organisations can quickly start seeing the benefits of digitisation and stay relevant in the ever-evolving digital economy.