Welcome to our training be more productive with automation my name is Emily Jarvis and here at govloop I'm our senior events manager and today I have the hippie Azure of also being your moderator so thanks so much for joining me and a special thank you to our partners at servicenow for helping us put on this session so let's get started because given that there's only 24 hours in a day to accomplished if you weren't stuck doing low value repetitive stuff that really eats away at your time probably a lot more and that's where automation could perhaps be your biggest Ally today our experts will discuss how automation can help increase your productivity for you and your Workforce but before we get into that wonderful content I do have a few housekeeping items to go over with you all if you're on Twitter or X or whatever they're calling it these days please share what you are learning alongside us using the hashtag GL train we have some great resources available for you on the console so make sure you check those out and we hope you don't have any technical difficulties but if you do send us a message to that ask a question Tab and my colleague Maddie will help you out and here is the secret sauce friends because it's in that same portal where you can ask our experts questions so don't you dare be shy put your questions in early and often of course we are recording this training and we'll send you a copy to your inboxes tomorrow so make sure you check that out you can watch the session again or send it along to one of your colleagues all right so finally uh this last piece of having I promise credit for today's training to get that credit you're going to need to stay on for the entire session take the three polls and fill out the post event evaluation you do those three things and we'll be sending you your CPE certificate all right with all that housekeeping out of the way let me introduce you to our speakers joining us today are Gabrielle perrett who is the director for the federal robotics process automation community of practice within the general Services administration at all fits on a business card we also have Chris Blakely who's the program manager for intelligent automation robotic process automation at Nasa and last but certainly not least we have Jonathan album who's the federal Chief technology officer with servicenow thank you three so much for being with us and Chris I'm going to kick things off with you because when we talk about automation I think a lot of things start spinning around in our heads right so I want you to lay the groundwork for me where does automation already exist in government or specifically more within your agency sure yeah so uh with NASA we kind of went on the automation robotic processing automation Journey back in 2017-2018 when we started the the program um that primarily focused on what I guess I call the low-hanging fruit those are the things that would be normally done by like a help desk things like travel maybe some procurement um those are the the it was in our shared services office at the agency so that was where most of it started I took over uh an agency-wide office in 2020 where we started to expand that across the agency so now we've kind of made it more of a a program that anybody can join system development is starting to grow bigger and we're starting to expand the automations outside of the sort of the low-hanging fruit area very cool um Gabrielle where where are you seeing automation already exist within sort of your organization lay that groundwork for me um so I'll speak to Across the government from the cop perspective um across the federal government federal employees have used RPA to improve processes um across all business lines from HR to acquisition to finance to it areas to Mission Assurance to Grants and Reporting even helping with the covid-19 crisis the federal community of RPA community of practice annually collects RPA use cases from teams RPA teams all across the government the first year we did this was in 2020 and we collected just over 300 use cases which was pretty awesome we collected them again in uh 2021 and in 2022 last year we collected over 1800 examples of how RPA is used in different business functions across the government by different teams and that's available to federal employees if you want to join the federal RPA community of practice very cool and we should definitely um we'll put a link to the RPA community of practice um in just a second um all right so Jonathan you've obviously heard the government perspective talk to me a little bit about what you're seeing from um you know some of your government customers when it comes to Automation in the works right now well I think you know Gabrielle and um and Chris both share some really good examples and I think those are common approaches to utilizing a tool like RPA to take some mundane tasks and automate that and but I'm seeing agencies go beyond just the RPA um you know concepts related to RPA and automating tasks with that thinking about end-to-end digital workflows and trying to automate large scopes of work you know one um one thing that comes up is within the HR function the onboarding process you know onboarding is a complicated task ever we've all joined new organizations and we know that lots of different organizations it's a new place you're working are involved if you have i t to get equipment you have um you know HR for forms you might have you know the finance CFO office for payroll so on and so forth there might be training or other kinds of things and you know that's a pretty disconnected process and to the extent that we can um we know somebody's coming on board we could automate aspects of either equipment distribution or we could automate um you know them being sent forms to fill out and complete we have uh the ability to make that very common process really simple and you know you're giving the employee a uh a head start to be productive in their in their new role they get on their job on day one as opposed to you know being heavily focused on Administration those first few days that can make a real difference so that's I think a really good example of how we can think about a large comprehensive process and automate aspects of it really for the uh for the benefit of the employee in the organization as a whole definitely and it's it's funny it's funny you mentioned that onboard wording piece I actually spent a couple hours in a training today looking at onboarding here specifically at gov Loop and I was like there are so many systems that we have to get up and running and I think other times we Overlook once you've been in an organization for a while just how much time that setup process goes my mind was a little blown this morning only I think that's a that's a great point because those early days of a new role are really critical and you know you people want to hit the ground running be productive and make a difference early on and not be mired in forms and you know God forbid they don't have a computer until day two three or four which can happen sometimes so there's a better way and then we're seeing that at a lot of agencies definitely of RPA and I think we can all see the trickle-down effect but Chris can you share a couple examples of how automation is actually making things easier for employees themselves I'm on the ground doing the work where can I see the impact of automation yeah so you know when when you think about Automation and where it's most beneficial uh it tends to be where you do those kind of uh low-grade tasks that nobody wants to do it's those those manual processes where you're taking data and maybe you're putting it into a system or you're doing something over and over again that you have to do every week or every month or even every day um and so one of the things that we've done that I can think of off top of my head was a uh PR that we automated so people would normally have to go in and add all these lines in uh they don't normally track these things in Excel uh we'll start with our finding and then do it manually with line by line go into sap and add these into sap one at a time and so it would take five to ten minutes per line and each user probably had 30 to 40 lines and at the end of the month you're talking about thousands of lines that people are adding in so they add up I mean it's only a few minutes per line per person but when you're talking 100 people doing it uh it can add up significantly so what we did is we ended up creating a custom sap entry where they could just bulk load in all the lines they could do if they had up to 200 lines basically nobody has that many but we wanted to make sure it was enough that we could handle in case someone did so we ended up uh you know they can both load in those those 50 lines or so push a button and then it goes to an unattended automation to go and run them it does take a while it's still it's not like it's done overnight or or in a few minutes but it'll still take an hour or two to process them but it's not being done by them it's being done in a process that they don't even see and they get an email that says hey your automation is complete and so that not only takes the onus off of them to have to go manually put this stuff in but it also helps with errors you know a lot of times people are copying facing wrong or typing it in wrong or whatever and it's just taking that sort of menial task away and having them work to to focus on more high value work so that's one example I love that um have anyone mentioned sell I start freaking out like I'm thinking I'm having to go back to like a class in college uh because I am not one for Excel equations um Gabrielle tell me about where you have an example or two of how automation is making things easier for employees themselves some of the cool automations uh that your RPA team has developed at GSA um since we developed our first Automation in 2018 uh We've now developed over a hundred automations that go across our business line for example we have an automation that can do contract closeout tasks like prepare or contractors release a claim conduct a contracts financial review draft a diab modification for our financial team we have a really cool automation that prepares trial balances automatically for our stakeholders for our HR our office we developed an automation that helps them to um speed up the process for employee spot Awards uh during covid we developed a few automations that help pull and track data from all different types of sources for building managers for our Communications office we developed an automation that helps to track and compile agency news clippings um all of these automations uh that we've built help gather and process these manual tasks and allow our employees to focus on the higher value work where they can make decisions and perform processes more efficiently and accurately I love the spa Awards specifically that sounds like something uh that is lovely uh to be able to to have on demand all right we've got the first poll question up right now and we're just simply kind of getting a pulse check from our audience here does your organization use musician and while they're answering that question Jonathan you know all of these examples that the three of you have shared so far are fantastic um and I think in we can really see the impact of those but obviously bringing in more automation has some challenges and barriers so I want you to talk to me about where do you see some of those sort of top pain points when it comes to investing in more automation sure you know I think that there are moments when people are thinking that well if you automate these tasks well the job is going to go away the job is going to change or you're not going to need me anymore and you see a lot of that with artificial intelligence that has the generative AI has the potential to you know really support the automation of of lots of tasks and change the way we work um but you know at least when it comes to Ai and I think these tools as well it's it's about using technology as a colleague as a supporter for the employee so they can get their job done faster and it becomes this opportunity to focus on the high value work like like Christmas Day so you really have to talk that talk about that with the organization with the people whose jobs are affected or the people who will be now served in an automated way as opposed to a person that change is really significant if you don't talk about it you know they're they're I think there's a real risk that the um introduction of these new technologies will be slowed or maybe even you know stalled it might it might fail because people aren't behind it so I think first and foremost we have to communicate the why this is good for the organization why is it support the mission why is it going to make things better and you know the people who are um you know effective will have new and different opportunities which is you know true I think with technology all the time and that's one thing and I think the other piece is um sometimes it's very easy to rush and say well we have this technology to automate this process we're going to automate the process Without Really evaluating whether or not it's the right process and you know very often I see um you know agencies and this was true and I was in government as well we we don't necessarily fully understand these processes we don't know how to work or the data flow through the organization and then we take the time to figure that out we can really think about is this the way we want it to work now that things are different in a you know post-covered world or things are different because we have these automation Technologies and we had to have the the take the time and you know have the courage to rethink and redesign our processes well then um we automate the best you know process in the best way possible in a way that's meaningful for today and you know then it's even easier in my opinion at that point to you know demonstrate that this is good for the organization because you really thought through it you have the credibility that that comes with that and I think you you bring up two really important points the first one that sort of met slash reality it's it's kind of hard to say exactly of you know automation or AI is going to replace my job we were talking to um some customer experience folks over at the IRS and they had brought in some automation to do some data entry that was happening in Excel docs and they couldn't get their staff to use it uh because it wasn't the way that they preferred to do it they were worried what would happen if they stopped doing it that way what would happen to their organization and so they have all of this technology that was sort of going to waste and so they were trying to come up with a strategy to to tackle that issue but that that one can be really sticky for a lot of organizations right Jonathan absolutely you know the adoption is important and um you know technology for the sake of Technology doesn't really go over well people want to know that you're bringing it in with a defined reason that's going to add value and it's it's going to get used and sometimes it's harder to do the change management and communication around the technology than it is to set up the technology and you know that um that is too easily lost on technologists sometimes so you take an organization wide uh approach in in view into the into the project and you know really pull in people from the mission I always found that to be a recipe for you know a greater likelihood of success wonderful had a couple of big ones there what additional challenges do you see or anything you'd like to add to the points that Jonathan was making well I mean so from a government perspective budget's always a concern right you know adding a new infrastructure or new tooling it can always cost money it can where does it live who owns it so there are some challenges that you need to figure out if you want to add automation uh support for your agency um you know are you going to have a centralized approach you can have a decentralized approach do you want citizen developers everywhere to build what they want or do you want a centralized place that can help them build what they need if they don't have time to do it so there's a lot of challenges along those ends uh the other side of it is you need to make sure that you know automation is not going to solve everything you don't automate everything it's one of those things you need to identify why you're doing it like Jonathan was saying um some people focus on what you'll hear a lot is Roi um if you're if you're automating something that's going to help one person for an hour a day it's probably not worth it if it's going to automate you know for one person that's going to save them 10 minutes but it's going to do a thousand people's jobs you know of that same thing that might be worth it but also it's not just Roi it could be error rates maybe you want the error rates to go down and it only affects a few people but the error rates can plummet because you automated that process the other thing that comes to mind is um there are two types of automations in my mind there's the Band-Aid which is I'm gonna get to a better solution later but I need this fixed right now and then there's the solution so you can automate something as a solution that's going to be carried forward for the long term or you can do something that I just need something right now to fix it until this solution is up and running so know what you're building before you get into it is important what Chris said about error rates I thought that was a really great point and you know program Integrity is the linchpin for so many programs to stay you know in good in good stead with the with the public you know I work for the food and nutrition service at USDA for a long time and you think about snap that program has a low error rate and you know because of high program Integrity people you know tend to support that program and it support helps a lot of people so to the extent that you can automate aspects of um the program to increase the Integrity to have a low error rate to limit improper payments or find fraud things like that you get a lot of um uh return on the investment from a mission perspective so I thought it was a great Point Chris definitely all right Gabriella I'm not leaving you out in the cold for this one uh what do you see in addition to what the gentleman said as some of the challenges here uh yeah there's a few other common challenges I've heard from agencies in the community of practice uh one is getting through navigating I.T hurdles and the advice from successful scaled up RPA teams is almost Universal um build relationships with your um I.T offices at the beginning from the start and really take the time to understand your agency's I.T process and identify those points of contact that you can work with and build those relationships um in it and loop them in throughout the process of building automations and really build this into your team culture that I.T is your partner in developing automations um you know another challenge some folks find is finding executive support and gaining executive support and the advice on that is be able to communicate really clearly about your success story your automation success stories in a way that translates to stakeholders so while an automation might be built for an acquisition team the functions that that automation performs like data data verification catching errors um you know reconciling information preparing reports any of the bot functions is kind of universal to stakeholders across your agency so be able to tell those stories in a way that people can relate to and that can help you gain some support and lastly when building up your RPA teams really look to federal employees uh you know ask folks um that know the systems usually federal employees are the ones who know our federal system the best and they can often be the ones who are best suited to help build automations and they are willing to be upskilled to gain these uh really hot hot skills of developing rpas and they are the ones who know the systems the best go to the people who know their stuff I think I think sometimes we all want to just figure it out on our own and we're like we're going to be the Trailblazers here but so often it is so much easier to to rely on the the wisdom of those who have gone before you so I think that is is terrific advice Chris I want to go a little bit more depth into this sort of workflow conversation that both you and Jonathan were having um when it came to the challenges because when we're thinking about bringing in new automation Technologies tools processes things like that how does the overall work well factor into this because I know Jonathan was saying you know we don't want to bring technology in for Technology's sake how do you think about that sort of holistic workflow approach when you're even considering some some new Solutions yeah so with at Nasa it takes uh you kind of have to step back and figure out what are we using today and what might integrate best with what we're using today every agency is different and what you might use we happen to be a Microsoft shop as an example um we use uh a couple different RPA vendors to uh to automate things but what we found or what I found specifically was the challenge with rpa's uh building automations is that automations generally solve a piece of the puzzle so you might have a workflow That's A to Z and automation will cover you know BCD and then the rest of it's still problematic but automation's not going to solve that problem um so what I've tried to do is incorporate and the way automation's going in general whether it's um you know being smarter by by adding intelligence to it or whatever they're just being more integrated into the uh underlying products so Microsoft as an example is integrating automation throughout everywhere there's not I mean there is an RPA type product for Microsoft but they have a power automate they have power automate desktop they have powder automated Cloud so there's all these different pieces of it but they're they're totally integrated on the back end so there's you can't it's not as easy to automate and just cover that specific I'm gonna go build something for BCD you're actually building the entire solution you're going to build a front end you're going to build the back end you're going to build the automation that works with the back end you're going to build the the power bi dashboard that shows you the analytics so what I found that is more valuable to customers from a marketing standpoint and just valuable to them from a solution standpoint is coming to a single source and say here's my problem can you solve the whole thing and with these newer sort of integrated packages you can in the past you were saying well I can't do the whole thing but I can do this little piece so yeah it's important to understand what you're automating what services work best with whatever it is that you you tend to work with every single day and then going with that and trying to expand it the best you can but it changes so often and they keep rolling out new features you've seen llm models coming out with the generative AI all that stuff's coming so you know it's get on the horse and start riding it and be ready for the ride that's coming because it's going to just get better and better so it's it's funny that you you phrase it like that because I um I know like my dad for example is not a technologist by any means he's a middle school teacher and he is like this stuff is so overwhelming to me I can't handle it and my grandfather was like how do you sing I felt uh talking to my dad when the internet came around and I had to transform everything that I did it's sort of a similar thought process you know every generation or many generation at this point was the way technology changes has to adapt to using new tools and new processes and it's it's happening whether or not we necessarily wanted to from a personal standpoint of course we do um but it is always sometimes tricky to to navigate that you know we got to get on board type of mentality for sure um Jonathan this is gonna sound like a crazy question based on this kind of conversation does automation actually help solve for Asian I think sometimes we rush right into what automation can do how do you think of it as solving a problem well you know we um I think it was Chris mentioned before budget's always a challenge budget is you know often tied to how well resourced an agency is a human resources excuse me it budgets off do we have the human resources at an agency to really do the mission um to do program reviews to do customer service to do these things that are very visible and you know make a real difference in people's lives and you know in many cases the answer the answer is no or we haven't had you know enough resources as the program's changing and evolved uh if we can automate the low value work as as was stated earlier and we're able to focus more of the human resources on the things that really matter or our mission should improve we should be more effective in serving the public or doing research or um you know uh supporting immigration or all of the the very important tasks that you know that our agencies have uh that takes you know humans and it takes real brain power and takes focus and attention um the administrative stuff the manual processes the uh the the fact that too often we don't have data integrated or you have to go lots of places to get data you're not using the technology that you own to its full extent make jobs harder so if we can make jobs easier and support greater focus on those really high value tasks now we solve uh we solve a resourcing problem that some agencies have um we have our second poll question up right now so I'll give you guys a few more minutes to answer that and while they do um you know Gabrielle I think um it's apparent that automation can solve a lot of challenges um for government agencies buy back a bunch of time make processes more efficient but can the technology alone fix some of these challenges or talk to me about what other elements need to be included that's a great question um so automation you know as um Jonathan and Chris said you know it helps to reduce manual and tedious work uh within a process and helps us work more efficiently and accurately it does not automatically fix a bad process and I think uh you know it's common to hear the golden rule is don't automate a bad process and so you know automation really is a process improvement tool it is a tool to be used uh so you know agencies should look uh holistically at the process evaluate it and fix any issues before automating when you're automating tasks within a process um you can plan where federal employees can best use their time you know to analyze make this decisions um you know as Jonathan said which ultimately lead to federal employees being able to achieve agency missions more effectively perfect all right we'll go ahead and split here um about 42 said yes and the other group said well we're not really quite sure uh when it comes to if automation is a priority at their organization of taking it as a good sign though that no one said a flat out no so that's that's where I was taking the win there um but that's not uh probably a whole lot of sense there I do want to remind our audience uh that if you are holding back on asking a question to our speakers well stop it go ahead and throw in your questions early and often because that's what we're here for we're here to answer your question so Chris I'm coming back to you earlier Jonathan was talking a little bit about some of the myths myths I can't talk today some of the myths surrounding automation one being of course that if you bring automation into an organization you are automatically going to be cutting some jobs and folks are going to be out of work where do you see some of the myths surrounding automation yeah uh so some of the things are that automations just work like once you automate it it's not going to break it's just gonna keep going right um RPA in general is sort of like the the child of of uh scripting back in the old days so scripting came first that was usually unseen it was in the back end and you didn't really know what was going on but it was pretty reliable you know they generally used apis or something like that to connect and do their automations RPA is is more on the front end so they're either running on your local machine or they're on some VM someplace in some cases it's physically clicking on items right like it's going in as a person or as you or as a bot identity and it's clicking on something and it's doing some work if that underlying software that it's clicking on changes for whatever reason it's common to break right like so you're you're spending a significant amount of time working on some of these automations that are built in a way where there's no API or you're always using these uh sort of like uh UI interfaces to do your automation so myth that automations will make your life easier is not always true the other myth I would say is it's worth automating everything I don't think that's quite the case um and it's also not always cheap right like automation can sometimes be more expensive uh than what it is to do it manually but it might be better because it's saving headaches or maybe like we talked about earlier with error rates I mean there could be reasons to spend more to automate it so those are some of the things I can think of definitely um and Jonathan we got a good question into the Q a portal we're talking today about sort of larger automations right agency-wide or department-wide things but the question said um you know are there low-level automations that perhaps we use regularly as employees or we could use regularly as employees to make our our um lives a little bit more efficient perhaps I think so um you know I would look at uh low code application development capabilities in different platforms like like servicenow as a way to do that you know when low code tools get rolled out in organizations you know it puts the power into people's hands to quickly create applications to digitize and and automate aspects of their day-to-day work and you know many tools um many platforms again servicenow as an example gives the gives the user the ability to create an app and use RPA that's built into the servicenow platform to automate tasks that we're describing and I can imagine those being applied into in individual employees day to day because it's a or it could be built around a function that employee does you know maybe they um they download data they copy to a spreadsheet that spreadsheet gets emailed somebody reviews the spreadsheet replies back you know that's a that's a kind of workflow that could be um relatively easily automated with right intention but it's it's rounded individual's tasks so I get the the questions uh the the participants questions point it's not going to necessarily rise to the level of you know um an agency-wide approach but there are ways to focus on small but important tasks those employees and I I would just note that the more things like that that we can automate or give people the ability to automate on their own or develop applications around on their own um the higher their job satisfaction is and the better their work experiences and their their work life is more like their real life where these these things aren't um so um so manual you know things we do in our in our home life is our not so manual we realize so much on digitized processes from the the companies and Brands and services we use outside of work so you know it's just part of that trend yeah and you know one of the things that I think is always interesting is how often we're using automation at work when we don't even think about it um you know for example setting a recurring calendar invite you know that's going to pop up at the same time every day instead of having to go in and create that invite individually that's an example of automation but if you ask me like do Emily do you use automation I'd be like er I don't know perhaps maybe so sometimes I think some of these Technologies seem a lot more um uh Out Of Reach then perhaps they they are for for a lot of us um who are already utilizing some of the some of the um all right so real from your from your perspective if I'm thinking about automation um as my organization um what should agencies who are looking to invest in automation what do we do to get started like who's involved what's happening what should what should be going on so I would recommend the first thing to get started if you're interested in the automation is to join the federal RPA community of practice um we can help you get connected uh with the existing RPA teams within your agency um I think most agencies have some sort of RPA pilot or program running right now so we can help you get connected to the folks who are already building automations um if you're if you know you don't have if your agency is new to automation we can um we have some great resources to help you start a pilot build and scale your program within the community of practice we publish an annual state of federal RPA report that gives a pulse check on RPA efforts across the government we have a federal RPA Playbook that is a guide to help programs Implement and scale RPA we host a lot of office hours and webinars with RPA experts to share best practices and success stories across the government and and we have a couple great really great newsletters we send out to make sure that you're in the loop of everything going on with Federal RPA and uh from there you know I can share a few like common best practices uh shared by successful RPA teams and I think it's been mentioned a couple times you know when you're you're starting a pilot program start small and start with simple use cases at first then scale up from there um really look for the low hanging fruit um the idea that might have led you to RPA the process that was manual complicated might not be the best one to start with um really carefully review that and start small and simple um to build on success and then you know as I mentioned earlier build your relationships with your it office early and throughout your entire process and make sure you Loop in all the stakeholders that need to get looped in when you build Automation and be sure to document the benefits of your automations once they're already running and share them to everybody who will listen in your agency communicate to your stakeholders in a way that lands with them be sure be sure you're sharing your results with Executives and uh you know anybody who could be interested benefit with from RPA and I'll say it again don't automate a bad process make sure that your process is sound and optimized before you start automating I love it all right we have our third and final poll question up right now and while you're answering that um Chris we got a follow-up question in here um you know you were mentioning sometimes this automations break and when they do you gotta go in and fix them and figure out what's going on so the question is what is the best way to address handling incidents when automation for critical business processes break what is your communication um strategy for for when an incident does occur yeah so uh so it sounds like that this might be if someone in the community had built it and then it breaks right so the way that we do it is we centralize it and we also decentralize it so we allow people to go and build automations on their own um we TR I want I want automation tooling to be as ubiquitous as Excel um so that's kind of like the goal but uh if you're building something that is critical to business for whatever reason we also are an o m shop so we would encourage that to come back to us to manage the onam process on it so we have people that are you know staffed up and ready to fix those things if they break so we encourage folks if they're going to build it on their own and it breaks you're kind of on your own right but if it is something that's going to impact number of users we then bring it back into the fold so that we are now in control of managing it and of course uh we have all the communication strategies up front so that if things break Wheats and all those agency-wide things out and explain on how things are going to be brought back up and all that fun stuff but yes uh that can be a problem if you're not well structured ours is again centralized so we can see all of the applications that are being built and if it has so many number of users uh that are utilizing them we tend to reach out and say hey is it something that could be critical and may need to come back makes a whole lot of sense all right the results for our third poll are in and Jonathan I'm curious your perspective here would we ask what is your biggest automation challenge the attendees today said properly trained employees was the number one answer here does this surprise you or is this something that you would anticipate yeah so I'm one I'm wondering if that's about training about how to create automation or or you know operate in a world where there is Automation and I think it might be both right you know oftentimes you'll bring in these technologies that have a lot of potential value but they don't feel very valuable because they don't get used and you know it's because we haven't spent the time to really explain to people how to use them and build automation uh so that's that's one thing that that comes to mind um it's not that these Technologies are hard per se but they do require training and you know the opportunity to think about how to use them we don't always get that space in our in our day and the other side of it is we could roll down a lot of automations and people are not necessarily able to benefit from them because they're either unaware of them uh and even though some things automated they're still doing it in a manual way uh not taking full advantage so um it's about communicating the change I know we've we've all talked about that already but again sometimes you cannot over communicate these things or over communicate the need to communicate so I I not surprised per se but I'm I am optimistic though because the training part is you know conceptually easy right if we get over the training part both about what we've rolled out or how to use these things now agencies that have already made these Investments can get more value from those Investments and that I think is really very encouraging it is definitely encouraging all right we are rapidly running out of time but I have two final questions for all of you um and Gabrielle we'll start with you you know we've talked about a lot of where we are right now and use cases from some great things that have already come to be but I'd like you to peer into your crystal ball a little bit what can you expect to see evolve over the next couple of years as it comes to automation um arcade teams are exploring and implementing intelligent automation Solutions which means that they're using other Technologies like document understanding natural language processing machine learning in conjunction with RPA we've seen this uh program started doing this in Cisco 21 we reported that in the state of RPA report in in fiscal year 22 we saw a big bump in um agencies implementing these other types of Technologies alongside RPA for example at GSA we've used a document understanding software that in conjunction with RPA that helped to process thousands of pages of lease documents and all different formats in our pilot use case of the document understanding technology our team reviewed more than 600 000 pages of lease documents and were able to capture the information that needed to be updated in each lease if there were any troubles reading information we flagged those for a human to review and I think that RPA teams will continue to find tasks across their agencies as they kind of expand and share their success stories um with stakeholders and other folks in their agencies good news travels fast the news about RPA travels fast and the demand for RPA is strong teams will continue to to grow and they'll also continue to look to upskill federal employees definitely well I'm coming to GSA uh next time I have to uh buy a house or lease a property because if you can go through that many documents you guys can handle one more perhaps all right Chris what do you expect to see involved oh yeah so I kind of alluded to this earlier integration everywhere like you're just gonna start seeing opportunities for Automation and the line's going to get blurred I mean right now RPA is kind of the buzzword and that's I mean the reality is kind of what uh Gabriella is saying initially RPA was kind of dumb it just would do what you told it to a process that was a b c d and it would do that process over and over again and if it broke it didn't care it would just keep doing it um it's getting smarter though so like she alluded to adding OCR technology to it so now I can read a document and then pick out the pieces of that document and then do something else with that so that there's some some intelligence being added to these things but I think that the nearer future you're going to start seeing more and more integration into products you're familiar with you're going to be doing automations that you don't even realize are automations and so again trying to get those tools to a point where you don't have to say I'm using this automation tool I'm using this thing to build something that is automating things in the background I think you're just going to see more and more of that I love it all right Jonathan you've got the hardest job here what what should we um expect to see evolve in the next couple of years well I I think the um the term will become well I think we'll become more focused on this term hyper automation which is you know using not just RPA but the emerging genitive AI Technologies workflow things that we've already heard about natural language process so on and so forth to automate so many processes in an agency and automate them end-to-end across multiple systems or multiple organizations my my dream is to see things get automated across um government agencies or different levels of government right you know we have uh so many times customer experiences that span departments you know if you look at the the President Biden's executive order on customer experience talked about life experiences if you're experiencing a financial hardship or you're leaving active duty military or you're applying for college or you're you have a young child you can touch a lot of offices a lot of agencies and these processes are are largely disconnected and I I think just building on what Gabrielle and Chris have said the next logical step is to think really big to dream really big around processes that can get automated that really serve the citizen in a meaningful way and in making it making it incredibly easy for them to interact with government and get the benefits that they deserve we have the building blocks you know we have to be able to put them together and we learn how to do this inside our own organizations our own offices we think about how do we build government-wide and that's a really to me that's really exciting opportunity all right Jonathan I'll attend these to walk away knowing thinking about they've gotten the back of their heads as they sign off today well you know so often um we we acquire Technologies in our organizations and we don't get the full value from them I've said that a few times and I think in order to you know really get value from Technologies we we have and we're and ones will buy in the future we have to not just understand what they can do but we have to understand how they can really be used in our organizations so you have to think through the processes that are challenging or where there's a lack of automation or where it's so manual it is a inhibitor to you know doing the real Mission work and think through those processes very carefully and you know reimagine them in a way where automation is a a value add and a real driver of you know effectiveness of uh like we talk about employee on boarding early to get people up to speed quickly or whether it's focusing on a citizen focused uh you know use case getting somebody the support they need very quickly but you have to think about the process holistically which means you have to understand and understand the data and you know I I always encourage people to start there and I just often you know share it doesn't uh you don't have to go out and buy a technology necessarily to do that upfront work to understand the process to think about what a better process might be do all that work first understand then that really can drive a you know a business case inside the agency with the CIO office or it investment review board and now you have a project ready to go and if there's funding at the end of the year or you know through some some future legislation you can you can you know very quickly uh make the case that you're the one who should get funded because you've done all that upfront work and that's a recipe for success in my experience definitely sounds like one um walk away with the information if you're a federal employee or an approved Federal contractor you can join the federal RPA community of practice use your.gov or dot mil email email thank you I like it short and sweet all right Chris you get to have our final word here today of everything that we talked about what should attendees be walking away no one's thinking about putting to use yeah so I I kind of follow along with Gabrielle because uh really I I didn't get here on my own I stood on the shoulders of others and helped me get here there's a lot of people that have already figured out the pitfalls if you're in the government you know that we do a lot of similar things that we can probably help you with security funding how do you get these tools rolled out these are all the things that we've probably already solved or at least tried to solve in our groups so uh reach out I'm happy to help Gabrielle happy to help we're here to help roll out whatever you need from us so that's what I would say well you heard it here they're wrapping ready to feel on their Journeys which we love to see that as part of this community here that we've brought together today however unfortunately we are out of time I want to thank our wonderful speakers for sharing their insights with us today just a few quick reminders before we log off first things first there are some resources available for you to download we talked about learning and growing from each other you can do so uh with those resources on your console make sure you check those out before you sign off they'll also be available on demand of course and speaking of on-demand we are going to be sending you a copy of this training so you can check that out it's coming to your inboxes tomorrow also if you're looking for that CPE uh credit make sure you take the feedback survey and if you do that we'll send that over to you but on behalf of govloop and service now I hope you enjoyed today's session and as always we really appreciate and value the work that you do so thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedules to join us this afternoon have a great rest of your day and we'll see you in our next training thank you thank you