Published in trend. PREMIUM on July 28, 202
TREND: Artificial intelligence applications are driving the digital transformation strongly. Where do you locate movement in public administration?
BASTIAN DRUGOWITSCH: Given the crisis situations of recent years, an efficiently functioning and resilient administration is essential. That is one driver. The second is the shortage of skilled workers, which means that fewer employees are actually doing more work. Intelligent automation of workflows is simply necessary, and this relieves public authorities of repetitive tasks so that they can focus on more important substantive work. There is certainly potential for efficiency in the administrative processes for over nine million people in our country.
How is this achieved in practice
Let's assume that a state administration has two million incoming mail items per year. Efficient employees need about one minute per receipt. Even if only half of this can be processed automatically, the manpower of more than nine employees is freed up for other activities each year. The time savings are enormous. In addition, modern technologies give government agencies the opportunity to position themselves as attractive employers and to shed their somewhat dusty image among the general public. Authorities offer many technically quite demanding jobs. Fabasoft was a pioneer in digitization with its electronic file at the beginning of the noughties.
How "intelligent" are these processes now?
With automation, we create a fast and significant benefit, especially in activities related to data capture and data processing. This means transferring data correctly into the system, classifying it and assigning it to the appropriate addressees. Authorities that already have a file system based on the Fabasoft eGov-Suite can implement the "Fabasoft Done!" automation overnight. Since the running system already contains a huge treasure trove of data, there is also no need for a preliminary project. The technology learns on its own and requires little guidance.
That sounds promising. Are government agencies already working with the feature and what are they doing with it?
Until now, data had to be read, sifted and classified manually. "Fabasoft Done!" makes suggestions for categorization and provides metadata along the way. Employees only have to check the suggestions or adjust them if they are not correct. In this way, the system is trained in the background and becomes constantly more accurate. If the recognition rate is very high, the authority can even go one step further and completely omit human verification of the automatic entries. In this way, the correctly classified data ends up directly with the person processing the application.
When will the "efficiency turbo" be available to customers in public administration?
The product has been available to customers since June 2023, and we are already seeing a very positive response. Many people are skeptical about artificial intelligence because they are afraid of job losses.
Rightly so?
This fear has been around since digitization started, so it's been around for many years, and it's obviously getting stronger with artificial intelligence and automation among some. In reality, it has changed in recent years. There is no way around harnessing these potentials of smart technologies. These automations will maintain the prosperity of our society. That is the only logical conclusion to be drawn from economic developments, demographic facts and a rapidly changing labor market.
Fabasoft Done
"FABASOFT DONE!" is an intelligent extension for the automatic classification of documents and extraction of information from texts.
The basis for this is an integrated machine learning model that constantly optimizes itself and can be easily adapted to individual customer requirements. The degree of automation can be easily controlled and adjusted - from default values in data processing to extensive automation. The technical principle is well thought-out, a quick introduction and the selected setting options make the implementation of "Fabasoft Done!" quite easy.
