The General Services Administration plans to issue a playbook to guide the agency and potentially the entire government in automating digital tasks, FCW reported Wednesday.
GSA wants to utilize robotic process automation bots, which can automate various tasks, such as data manipulation, data entry, email handling, data reconciliation and extracting data from documents. To help the government implement RPA, the agency plans to establish a community of practice in January to connect federal employees and officials who work on the technology.
The community will also help GSA create a government-wide playbook to guide other agencies in automating daily tasks. The Trump administration expects five percent of federal occupations to be entirely automated, while 60 percent of jobs could be partially automated. GSA is automating some internal processes with RPA, including the agency’s financial system and invoices.
The agency may soon include data entry in their efforts among other larger “higher value” applications, according to GSA’s RPA Program Director Ed Burrows. The federal government launched its first process automation bot in 2017.
