Civic Innovations

The role that technology plays in the way that governments operate and deliver services is hard to overstate. To appreciate just how important technology is, we can simply look at recent examples where local governments — hit with ransomware and other types of cyber attacks — have taken the drastic step of turning off their digital systems. What these governments have learned the hard way is that it is next to impossible for public sector agencies to operate in the 21st Century without technology.

Because technology is essential to the work of government, it’s more important than ever that governments make sound choices around the kinds of technology they acquire and use. When picking the kinds of technology to use, how do agencies make the best choice? How do they select technology tools that will address the needs they have today and well into the future?

Some choices that are made in the short term go on to have significant long term costs that are not always obvious up front. This is the case with a choice that some governments are increasingly making: Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

Short term benefits, long term costs

A good way to think about the tradeoffs between short term benefits and long term costs is with debt.

If your car unexpectedly breaks down, the first thing you will reach for is a credit card to pay the repair bill. Compared to other financing options, credit cards come with a relatively high interest rate. But, when you are in a bind and are facing a time sensitive challenge (like a car that’s not working), your other options may be limited. If the repair bill is reasonable and you can pay off the balance in a short period of time, the long term cost you will pay for using the card is low. 

In contrast, if you were looking to buy a new car, the credit card in your wallet might be the least attractive option. With time to plan your purchase, you’ll opt for other kinds of debt with better terms and a much lower long term cost. The kind of debt you use matters. If we pay it down quickly, high interest debt can be appropriate in the short term, while low interest debt is far more appropriate for the long term. 

Solutions for the issues facing legacy technology systems in government agencies can work in much the same way.

Short-term benefits of RPA

One increasingly popular option that governments are choosing to address short term challenges is RPA. RPA includes any software tool or utility that replaces everyday, repetitive, labor-intensive tasks with an automated process. It is an increasingly popular option for agencies with legacy technology systems, complex workflows, and backlogs for approving applications for services. 

These agencies may be saddled with legacy systems that are not integrated, requiring manual intervention to add, update, or reconcile information. Lots of staff time is required to support these processes, and there are often backlogs and bottlenecks for applications or approvals as a result. These backlogs can place enormous pressure on agencies and are a source of frustration and anger for the people they serve. 

Agencies that find themselves facing these challenges are like the unlucky driver who has their car break down. Faced with an unexpected crisis and pressed for time, options may be limited. It is understandable that some agencies choose RPA tools as a way to resolve pressing issues in the short term. 

But, like a high interest credit card, the convenience and immediate relief provided by RPA comes with significant long term costs.

Lack of portability

Automations built on a specific RPA platform or with specific vendor tools are not portable to other platforms. RPA tools tightly couple agencies to a specific vendor. While vendor neutrality is always important in evaluating technology choices, it is particularly important here as the industry is still new and changing rapidly. Vendor consolidation, support for different features, and rapid changes in pricing are to be expected.

This situation is not unlike the one agencies face when they evaluate different cloud service providers, which can include a dizzying array of choices. Cloud platforms offer agencies a myriad of different options, some of which solve the same problem but in a different way. Agencies evaluating different cloud service options should consider how tightly wed a specific solution would make the agency to a specific provider. Will building a cloud service option into an agency solution make it impossible to transition away from the platform down the road? These are the kinds of questions agencies need to ask before they invest in a specific technology platform or tool.

Limited ability to help end users

RPA tools alone are limited. By themselves, they cannot dramatically improve the user experience of government services. Processes that are complex, require multiple steps, with multiple review and approval stages often place an enormous administrative burden on those that use them. RPA tools don’t enable an agency to reengineer a broken process, or improve an end user’s experience—they simply try to make an existing broken process go faster. And while this is certainly important, by itself this will not allow agencies to fulfill the mandate in the White House’s Customer Experience Executive Order of reducing administrative burdens and improving the quality of public services for the public.

Pushing the bottleneck

Complex government processes typically have multiple stakeholders, span multiple legacy systems, and involve different sets of employees. RPA tools can create a sort of tunnel vision, focusing attention on narrow parts of these processes. Trying to shoehorn an automated step into one small part of a long, complex process often creates new and unforeseen problems. 

Consider the example of a suggestion box placed in the common area of an office location. Each item dropped into a suggestion box may be reviewed by the company CEO, who updates employees on the company’s response to each suggestion in a regular weekly meeting.The process may work fine for some employees physically located near the suggestion box. It probably works less well for remote employees who are unable to physically submit their comments or have time to write them out. An improvement to the existing process might be to remove the manual step and let employees email their suggestions to a shared inbox. 

This new enhancement will likely be much more convenient for both remote and on-location employees. The number of comments and suggestions submitted by employees will now begin to grow, flooding the shared inbox and overwhelming the CEO’s ability to review them. Suggestions will now go weeks and sometimes months without being reviewed. The weekly update process begins to break down, and employees are increasingly less likely to hear the response to suggestions they submitted. The suggestion box becomes a black hole. Instead of eliminating a bottleneck, the enhancement simply created a new one — pushing it one step further along in the process. The process is still broken, it’s just broken in a different way now.

This effect of “pushing the bottleneck” is not uncommon with RPA. By focusing automation on a narrow part of a much larger process, RPA tools can have unintended consequences for actors farther downstream in the process. RPA replaces manual effort, allowing specific parts of a process to occur more quickly. Where a manual step might be completed dozens of times a day, an automated version of the same step might be completed hundreds, or even thousands of times per day. Unless all steps along the chain in that process are able to accommodate the increased throughput, a new bottleneck will develop, perhaps with unforeseen consequences like in the case of the suggestion box. Instead of eliminating a bottleneck, RPA may just move it further along in the process.

Moving beyond RPA

Just as using high interest debt in the short term can be acceptable if it is paid down quickly, using RPA in the short term can make sense as well. But only if there is a plan to pay down this debt within a reasonable timeframe. 

The best way to pay down the high interest debt of RPA and avoid racking up long term costs is to develop a plan to retire RPA tools and platforms. Doing this requires an analysis of the full scope of the process that RPA is intended to improve. This is typically done in two ways, which can be accomplished separately or together.

• Planning to replace (or better integrate) existing legacy systems. The points of friction at which RPA is typically applied are ones that are usually well suited for integrations. Integrations are more scalable, with less tendency towards unexpected consequences. 
• Service blueprinting, which provides a comprehensive picture of an existing process, and all of the steps an agency goes through to support it. An agency with a service blueprint can far more easily overhaul an existing process. Redesigned services means the bottleneck doesn’t just get moved downstream; every part of its new process functions better for both employees and the people the agency serves.

A good framework for determining how RPA might benefit agencies with complex manual processes is to apply a four step approach – eliminate, optimize, automate, and modernize (EOAM).

• Eliminate: determine if the process being used is required, or is just a convention or practice that has developed over time. If the process is not clearly required and is eating up lots of staff time, consider eliminating it.
• Optimize: if a process is required, undertake efforts to optimize it by reducing unnecessary complexity or superfluous steps.
• Automate: If a required process has been fully optimized and still requires a non-trivial amount of staff time, consider how automation might speed up the process. Make sure this automation is managed as part of a larger automation governance and approval process.
• Modernize: If a process has been automated to accommodate a lack of proper integration between legacy systems, plan to deprecate this automation when the existing systems are upgraded and modernized.

If we don’t make plans for moving away from RPA, it’s akin to making just the minimum payment on a high interest credit card each month. The underlying debt doesn’t go away, it just grows larger and the problem gets more acute. While RPA can be a sensible choice in the short term, agencies should take steps to pay down this high interest debt and move on.

Note – this content originally appeared on the Government Technology website.