Intelligent Document Processing – bringing seamless document archival to the Public Sector
As Artificial Intelligence makes its foray into numerous industries, the Public Sector is one such industry where AI-based process automation solutions are being increasingly adopted.
Traditionally speaking, Public Sector organizations manage huge volumes of public documents manually across multiple channels. Employees in these organizations often bear a huge responsibility to ensure that the public documents are sorted and classified as per specific requirements, correctly archived, and made accessible to the citizens whenever required.
Some of the recent innovations in AI are proving to be extremely beneficial for this sector, such as process automation using smart AI-based document processing techniques. This blog talks about AI-powered Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), a fairly new innovation in the AI industry. This revolutionary technology can handle documents containing both structured and unstructured data (free-text) using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
Challenges of archiving documents in the Public Sector
The overall Public Sector is experiencing numerous challenges in the form of heavy workloads and work pressure on the employees. Employees in these organizations are also required to work on repetitive tasks in the form of public inquiries, reply to them, and archive the associated emails and documents.
Another challenge exists in the form of being prone to data breaches and other security issues that could lead to the data being misused. Lastly, Public Sector organizations in a few countries suffer from limited funds and employee staff availability to tackle the rising workload of document processing.
These challenges are making the Public Sector look for technology solutions such as Intelligent Document Processing to handle repetitive and monotonous tasks in a more efficient manner.
Importance of maintaining trust and transparency with citizens
Manual methods of handling the documents may cause errors over time, and these may prove to be highly inefficient in terms of time consumption. These inefficiencies may range from recording wrong data in documents to loss/displacement of documents because of unorganized archival. This could lead to a lack of public transparency and trust in the citizens for Public Sector organizations. Such efficiencies might become a huge problem during emergency events such as a pandemic, wherein citizens need to access healthcare documents from local public authorities.
Hence, when it comes to public welfare, maintaining the right amount of trust and transparency relations is crucial for government authorities. Providing easy and transparent access to public documents for the citizens is one way by which their trust can be upheld. Ensuring correct data entry and data processing can help Public Sector organizations stay away from error-prone actions, which further strengthens public belief. Proper archival of public documents helps in better and informed decision-making for both the citizens and government authorities.
Intelligent Document Processing and its use in the Public Sector
Intelligent Document Processing is mainly defined as the method of using AI technologies such as NLP and OCR to extract desired information from different document types, interpret it, and process the documents based on pre-determined business rules. IDP can also be used to carry out specific actions during business operations.
How does IDP work for Public Sector?
Documents used in the Public Sector may exist in the form of unstructured data or free text. Traditional document processing techniques are often not equipped to process free-text data. However, AI-powered Intelligent Document Processing uses Natural Language Processing to read, extract, and process data from structured as well as unstructured documents.
Both the technologies of NLP and OCR make it possible to extract relevant information by identifying key intentions, keywords, phrases, and other important data points in the form of entities. Based on the interpretation of this extracted data, IDP techniques can use the information to carry out several actions:
What does the Public Sector stand to gain from Intelligent Document Processing?
A USP of IDP is the accurate extraction of information and a high-quality interpretation that can be used for further processes. This USP can generate a lot of benefits for Public Sector organizations in terms of document processing and archival, some of which are given below:
- Improved communication with citizens by timely replies and forwards
- Organized document archival for better public accessibility
- Improved trust and transparency between organizations and citizens
- Faster completion of processes that require public data use
Conclusion
In this blog, we saw how Intelligent Document Processing can streamline document handling for Public Sector organizations by saving multiple hours of manual document processing. This Digital Employee works 24/7 in the Norwegian Public Sector and can provide an automation grade of up to 90%.
The Public Sector faces several challenges such as heavy workloads and work pressures, extensive time consumed for carrying out repetitive tasks, limited funds, and staff availability, to name a few. These challenges often lead to less trust and transparency among citizens for Public Sector organizations.
Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) can help these organizations overcome these challenges by ensuring streamlined document processing, improved document archival, and accurate recording of public data. With the help of IDP, Public Sector organizations can thus benefit in the form of improved communication with citizens, improved trust and transparency, and faster completion of processes.
About Simplifai’s IDP Solution
Simplifai is an AI solutions company that enables Public Sector organizations to incorporate Intelligent Document Processing in their work operations with the help of our Digital Employees.
The Digital Employees comprise individual product modules such as Emailbot and Documentbot, together with other components such as API/RPA integration, Natural Language Processing, and business rules. A Digital Employee for the Public Sector can seamlessly handle repetitive tasks such as processing incoming and outgoing public documents, maintaining citizen records, and properly archiving of documents.
The National Archive Service of Norway recently adopted a Simplifai Digital Employee solution to process public documents and even handle their emails. This Digital Employee can take care of repetitive tasks like assessing public records and data updates, document archival, and communications with the citizens.
Want to know more about how the Simplifai Digital Employee for Public Sector works? Click the button below for more information.
