The Department of Digitalization of the Community of Madrid has announced a commitment to automation in which it will invest 6.7 million euros over the next four years to robotize up to 200 administrative procedures.
The perfect breeding ground
One of the most recurrent complaints among the citizens is the slowness and tediousness of bureaucratic procedures. However, paradoxically, this inelastic corset, which is far removed from the exceptions, is the perfect framework in which to make a commitment to automation.
It is an environment in which the steps, the procedures, are very measured, defined and regulated. The usual inflexibility of the administration facilitates the emergence of processes that are executed in a repetitive manner, without changes or exceptional situations. It is the perfect environment in which to implement an automated system using software robots.
Automation for continuous improvement
The fact that an administration (especially one as important as the Community of Madrid) is committed to automation in such a decisive manner is, in reality, a step forward on the road to continuous improvement.
The automation of processes will allow officers of the Community of Madrid to spend less time on repetitive tasks, such as entering data in forms or transferring information. The saved time can be used to improve and expand citizen service, to perform more qualified tasks or to make decisions. Those kind of tasks that a robot cannot complete and that necessarily require the intervention of a person.
This greater time dedicated to personal contact, to helping and assisting people, will result in an improvement in the service provided to the public. Better treatment of the users of public administrations, more satisfaction among employees as their heavy workload is reduced, and better service evaluation as the focus of attention has shifted from paperwork processing to people care.
The Community of Madrid is committed to the automation of processes in public administration.
How many processes can be automated?
When an organization, whether public or private, decides to embark on the path of automation, the first step is always the same: perform an audit of processes that can be automated.
From that moment on, a selection begins among those that offer the best relation between the difficulty of their implementation (there are processes that can be automated in a few days) and their impact on the day-to-day development of the activity.
In the Community of Madrid they have already carried out this process, and as part of their commitment to automation, they have decided to convert 200 manual processes into automatic ones over the next four years. The bet is not trivial. However, in their search for candidate processes, they have found more than 1,700 public procedures that could be carried out by software robots. Let’s imagine now a translation to all the administrations of the State. The time savings and increased effectiveness of the public administration would skyrocket.
Taking a step forward
As we have seen, the commitment to automation is a clear step forward in its implementation in the public administration. As the counselor emphasized, it is a tool that provides higher quality jobs, motivates workers and improves productivity.
If we add to this that the speed of processing increases, management times and errors are reduced and the response to the citizen is optimized, we obtain as a result an element of absolute benefit.
