Insights

Many in the world—and I count myself among them—are well into the era of verbally conversing with machines. I speak, of course, about voice-enabled digital assistants. Whether you address yours as “Siri,” “Google,” “Alexa,” or something else, controlling and querying computers in the way Gene Rodenberry imagined in the original 1966 Star Trek series is now a typical piece of 21st century life. My grandchildren will never know a time without conversant boxes sitting on the counter.

Challenges of Serving Constituents

The concept of document automation is using a machine instead of a human to identify the document type and capture core business information from the document. Documents today do not typically mean paper. Email, web portals, and other communication mechanisms mean the documents seldom get to a physical form. This conversion from unstructured data into structured data is what we know as document automation.

To serve customers, businesses tend to solve process problems quickly—although not often also with efficiency. Instead, the solve often includes tasking workers with menial assignments. Requiring little thought, these mind-numbing tasks are often prone to error. They are also almost always integral to the larger process.