Top 5 Digital Transformations in the Public Sector

Broadly defined, digital transformation encompasses all the activities and processes of integrating and adapting digital technology for new and existing business workflows. There is no department or objective within an organization that wouldn’t benefit from the overall intent of digital transformation initiatives in any industry. However, public sector entities can benefit from modernizing and automating their processes and accessing their data.

Here are five key use cases to guide, help and support digital transformation efforts to better serve constituents and government employees:

Automating workflows for manual mail ingestion, processing and sorting represent the enormous potential of digital transformation efforts for large governmental agencies. What could be an incredibly time-consuming, human-driven series of steps for moving incoming mail and all its associated data to where it needs to be within the organization can be streamlined for cost and time savings. Technology for automated mail identification, sorting, indexing, classification, data extraction, document routing and application integration touches all aspects of digital transformation: workflow automation, application interoperability, advances in machine learning technology, and more.

In early 2020, the Department of Veterans Affairs embarked on an overhaul of their mailroom operations on their path to modernizing the agency. What was once an entirely human-driven workflow was replaced with centralized operations, high-speed scanners, intelligent document processing and data extraction and automated mail packet routing. A crucial component of this revamped workflow was the method by which incoming documents were automatically recognized, data was extracted, and information from the forms used to power the workflow process.

Another example is a large, federal agency that modernized and centralized their mailroom and correspondence processes as they were handling over 61 million pages annually. Deployment and processing time went from hours to minutes, they increased productivity and they were able to scale operations during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thetop priorities for the DOD’s Digital Modernization Strategy are: Cybersecurity; Artificial Intelligence; Cloud; and Command, Control and Communications (referred to as C3). And in the wake of this global pandemic, it is likely that government agencies will see an increase in IT cloud spend while departments transition from in-office work policies to remote work with an emphasis on work-from-home protocols.

To support a scalable, flexible work environment, intelligent capture solutions needed for the first step of any digital transformation project can be hosted in the cloud, hybrid or on-premises. Automating public sector document-centric processes in the cloud offers flexibility with the benefit of business continuity and without the added burden of server management.

Internal operations – rather than externally provided services – is an area ripe for digital transformation. According to KPMG’s report Digital Transformation in the Public Sector, “improvements to organizational efficiency, processes, intelligence, visibility, and worker development” are a priority for agency survival and growth.

Roughly translated, state and local government agencies identified the need to transform their internal operations before they’re able to offer improved or innovative services to their constituents. One example of operational improvement is re-thinking the Procure-to-Pay process. Whether public or private sector, all businesses are subject to the pains of processing invoices and vendor payments. Having repeatable, complex workflows in procurement or accounting departments are ready for a digital transformation-style makeover.