How automation is enriching the lives of employees
Our Aivantor Chief Technology Officer Tor Clark recently wrote an article on how automation is not only improving customer experience but is enriching the lives of employees as the switch from transactional work to more challenging value add activities. I wanted to explore the impact on automation to be able to make rapid real-world impact not just on customers of businesses, but on Citizens who are often the most vulnerable in our society.
Public Sector has grappled for decades with the challenge of directing benefits and other interventions to those that need them most. Indeed, in my early career in DWP I witnessed these challenges first hand in terms of complex application processes laced with the need to continually supply evidence of identity, evidence of income and evidence of need such as dates of birth or children. Then once the application process had been overcome the data that has been gathered has to be put through a complex and lengthy adjudication process which can become open to interpretation. So much so that in some cases there are 100% checks on benefit awards even referred to as Technical Checking Teams. Fast forward 30 years and this environment is largely unchanged.
All this data gathering and back and forth between benefit claimants and benefit processing teams creates two huge problems. The first is the length of time it takes before benefits can be awarded. It is not unusual for 13-to-26-week lead times from the point of application until benefits are paid. No wonder that some customers I speak to are advising that benefit take up can be as low as 40% of those eligible. This has the obvious negative impact on those in our society who need those benefits to survive. Even more so now we are in the grip of a cost-of-living crisis with unprecedented numbers of people making daily decisions on whether to eat or heat.
The second is that the energy and resources need to support inefficient application processes burn a massive amount of budget that would be better spent in the hands of the citizens it is seeking to support. Automatic Disbursements of benefits seems to be the answer so why has it not happened before now?
Across the globe there are some notable administrations that are looking differently at this challenge. Many years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting with representatives of the Flemish Government to look at their Once Only Principle whereby citizens and business are legally only obliged to supply information to government once. It is then the responsibility of the government to exchange that information efficiently and securely and ensure that all benefits that are eligible are paid, for example for Free School Meals, Clothing Grants Attendance Payments for 5th and 6th year high school students.
The Flemish Government solution to that problem was the highly regarded MAGDA platform. The MAGDA (Maximum Data Sharing between Administrations and Agencies) platform provides one common service-oriented data exchange infrastructure for the 190 agencies and 13 departments of the Flemish regional government, and for the 308 local governments. It provides access to base registries of citizen and enterprise data, harnessing open standards technologies that can be easily adapted to the needs of different government administrations.
Whilst the MAGDA platform is an amazing achievement it has been built up over decades. Critical to the success of the Magda Platform was the co-operation and alignment of multiple central and local government departments which has been remarkable. Across the UK and devolved administrations our Public Sector technology strategies have simply not had this sort of alignment. Data Protection and GDPR concerns have served to further lock down information exchange between departments and technology barriers have even prevented internal information sharing. I have heard first hand from some clients that attempting to integrate existing applications and build workflow support to launch new policies have become so cumbersome, time consuming and costly that they have simply been abandoned. This is due the long tail of design, and regression testing needed to ensure that the legacy functions of these applications are not affected by the new development work. To put this into perspective one client quoted an example of 4 days of regression testing for every days’ worth of new development.
So how can next generation automation technologies help deliver rapid Policy Design and Launch? Put simply, automation technologies literally sit on top of your existing technology stack, above the application layer. This means that your new virtual workers interact with your core systems using the same user interfaces as physical worker colleagues. Instead of using traditional complex core system integration approaches, new citizen journeys required to deliver policy objectives can simply be overlaid on top of existing core systems and avoid the burden of complex integration and testing.
High friction processes to supply evidence of entitlement may be avoided by obtaining the required information to assess entitlement from central and local government functions in simple one-way data extracts in the form of automated reports. Instead of the usual approach of applying human glue to benefit delivery and diverting resources from other areas, low-cost virtual worker automations may be designed and deployed in 6 to 8 weeks. Your new virtual workforce is 6 times more efficient than their physical colleagues and at circa a 1/3 of the cost. If process peaks are experienced more capacity can be added immediately simply by buying more virtual workers.
A key benefit is that new policy interventions can be salami sliced and implemented much more rapidly than an end to end system integration programme of work that demands lengthy regression testing phases before implementation. This creates immediate social and economic impact and directly benefits the lives of citizens much earlier so that Policy Design and Launch is now measured in weeks rather than years with Citizens obtaining benefit while the remainder of the policy programme is built out.
To learn more about how Aivantor can help you achieve your policy implementation goals at unprecedented speed and at significantly lower cost please get in touch.
David Cameron is a Co-Founder of Aivantor Ltd