AI has the potential to significantly impact mission outcomes through strategic leadership, employee skills and citizen engagement. IDC research indicates that federal agencies are applying AI technologies to these fundamental processes and incorporating AI into the fabric of their mission to become digitally resilient, and transform how employees work, learn, and interact with constituents.
What is Resilience?
Resilience addresses the agency challenges of speed and productivity. IDC defines two types of resiliency. The first is mission or business resiliency and the second digital resiliency. Mission or business resiliency is the ability for an organization to rapidly respond to disruptions and restore mission operations in a timely fashion.
So then, what is Digital Resiliency? Digital resiliency is the ability for an organization to rapidly adapt to business disruptions by leveraging digital capabilities to not only restore operations, but also capitalize on the changed conditions. Organizations succeeding in the digital economy need to excel at pivoting rapidly as disruption happens. That means the ability to not only sense and respond to both internal and external environments, but also innovate well beyond any crisis. Organizations supported by data, analytics, insights, and AI can respond quickly and impactfully to changing environments.
Where to Start?
IDC advises agencies to start with leadership as the capstone for organizational resiliency. Agency CIOs will drive business modernization and transformation to empower digitally resilient organizations. Working in tandem with business leaders, and armed with strategic AI roadmaps, agency CIOs will lead the re-platforming of the organization, enabling a skilled, data driven, collaborative hybrid workforce, and innovate to create well-orchestrated AI approaches to customer journeys.
To succeed, CIOs need an adaptable, enterprise-wide strategy. IDC research indicates that approximately 50% of agencies will struggle to scale, as they don’t have an enterprise-wide AI strategy, they are only experimenting with AI, or their AI efforts are unconnected and don’t support line of business objectives.
The growth and adoption of AI and intelligent automation solutions is giving rise to a new digital worker and that is rapidly changing the nature of the government workforce and the skills required.
Next, agencies need to understand skill requirements and gaps and staff for and develop appropriate skills to operationalize AI. Agencies are using several AI enabled technologies to recruit, train, and retain talent to harness the skills required to deploy AI enterprise-wide in their organization.
In addition to training, agencies need to incorporate a closely established relationship between employee performance and career in advancement and create AI pathways for employees to achieve advancement. A human and AI team combo is much more effective than either alone. It enables employees to extract more value from their work, make data driven decisions, and empowers employees to deliver services more efficiently wherever they are – in offices at home or in the field. We are seeing agencies apply intelligent technologies to change the way work tasks are performed by augmenting and automating work while creating value within the organization.
And finally, AI enables agencies to better serve constituents through AI empowered solutions that enhance citizen experience. AI is assisting employees to shift from low value to high value work, off load menial tasks, and free up time to innovate and improve the delivery of constituent services. Federal agencies are deploying AI-enabled bots to reduce errors and delays in the enrollment process via digital verification as well as errors in benefit administration to ensure that benefits are accurately delivered. Bots can read and processes e-mail, look for new files in group folders, provide feedback in real time when exceptions to work instructions are encountered, and report all its work upon completion. Additional AI technologies deployed for enhanced citizen service include optimization engines, augmented analysis recommendation engines as well as intelligent tasks or process automation.
Paramount Trends in Federal Government’s Use of AI
To learn more about how government agencies are adapting to business disruptions by leveraging the digital capabilities of AI to not only restore operations, but also capitalize on the changed conditions check out IDC’s new eBook, The New Normal: How AI is Enabling Resiliency in Federal Agencies.
Our upcoming webinar, Operationalizing and Scaling AI in Federal Government, live on September 15th at 11 AM/ET we’ll discuss these trends and agencies’ actions in more detail with added contacts. Additionally, we will discuss AI technologies used for successful agency digital transformation. I look forward to your joining this webinar.
