Business Process Automation in govt sector is the need of the hour: Sunil Thakur, BMC

For a long time, efficiency gains and cost savings were enough, When enterprises list their automation requirements today, terms like real-time, hybrid IT, DevOps, self-service and big data are prominent. How do you see workload automation playing a very important role here?  How important is operational efficiency for you/your organisation?

Automation is not a new technology for the government. We now know that embracing the idea of automation compliments business functions that work with human manpower and it augments the employees’ skills by enabling them to improve their performance. Recently, I read a World Economic Forum report which said the 75 million existing jobs may become redundant by 2022, but on the other side it also stated that automation is going to create 133 million new jobs. There was another interesting point in the report that stated 65 per cent of children entering primary schools today will ultimately end up working in completely new job sectors that don’t even exist today. This coupled with events that happened in the last six months where IT was extensively used for citizen centric services, I clearly see a huge potential for all emerging technologies, especially automation. I must say that workload scheduling is game-changing automation technology. All of us know that the ecommerce organisations played a key role amidst the pandemic in serving the customers. Each time an order is placed, a system-to-system mechanism works behind the curtain to ensure the people get their orders in time. The e-commerce industry uses many applications to serve their users and for  successful completion of an order, multiple automation platforms work like a one platform. Even a single error of one of the systems can lead to failure. The workload scheduler like Control-M framework fits in wonderfully as it grants you visibility across the entire process. At BMC, we were trying to speed up invoicing and billing processes and we did this by integrating the file transfers at the right time and place. We took up 10 used cases and there were about seven applications like Sharepoint, Salesforce, Oracle ERP, etc., and put all this together and we tried to improve on them. The result was we had a two to four times reduction in critical path processing, supporting all this business agility. We saved around five million USD of operating expenses in the year. This is a great benefit of automation technology. 

What are the common applications of workload automation in governments/organisations?

I will give you one example of how data can be used for workload automation. During the cyclone Vardah which hit parts of Tamil Nadu, which severely impacted the lives of people. There was a Facebook campaign to save the lives of people and how could we use data to serve the citizens during the crisis. This is all unstructured data which can be collected from customs or other departments to do some processes through Big Data tools where it can be processed. Then it is further pushed into Business Intelligence tools which give you live intelligence. For people who are monitoring the situation or crisis, they get to know from which places they are not getting ‘#IamSafe’ clicks/posts. The government can then decide to direct its activities to help people in distress in different parts of the state. This is how technology can help the government in a major way. Everybody is vouching for automation technologies.