Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, federal agencies are broadening and expediting robotic process automation efforts to deal with disruptions and drive productivity.
During a virtual ATARC panel Tuesday, officials from three agencies offered a glimpse into automaton use cases that are boosting operations, detailed how they’re gaining buy-in from personnel along the way and considered how the present pandemic-induced reality could transform the future of work. The officials were joined by experts with insights into industry and state governments.
“None of our job descriptions said ‘you will cut and paste, cut and paste, cut and paste.’ So that's what RPA is letting us give up,” Stacy Dawn, senior adviser for cybersecurity and privacy at the Housing and Urban Development Department, said. “You don't want to do that work. You want to be able to use your mind and be productive. So it's enabling employees to feel more productive.”
RPA is an emerging technology practice that usually incorporates bots or digital assistants and ultimately encompasses automating business processes that generally require tedious, manual work. Having started her civil service journey more than two decades ago, Dawn said she’s been impressed to see how, in recent years, automation is increasingly enabling federal insiders to complete tasks that “took so much time before.”
Still relatively at the onset of some of its own RPA-deployment and implementation, Dawn said the agency is presently working to implement automation “to help people stay in their homes” during the pandemic. HUD is essentially preparing and setting up the proper infrastructure, she noted “so that automations can run and we can make sure that people have the tools that they need so that they don't get evicted—or if they have late payments, ..
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