The Department of Agriculture is no stranger to testbed technologies. After taking part in the Centers of Excellence program, USDA is now exploring the use of robotic process automation to free up staff for more “high value work.” Gary Washington, chief information officer at USDA, says that his office is currently managing the tech across the agency.
“The CIO’s office is going to take on the overall management of the backend portions of RPA. We are going to open it up to other customers like HR, procurement and other areas. Even our programs wanted to get involved.” “We have transactional activities. There’s also a security component to this, to secure the bots that we create that actually do the processing. It is significant to have a centralized approach and being able distribute it properly.”
Lynn Moaney, deputy chief financial officer at USDA, says that the response to RPA has been overwhelmingly positive.
“Everything that we’ve done is applicable and can be replicated across the department. I think it was an opportunity for us to really see how well RPA could work for the department,” Moaney said. “And now that it is up and it is running, the demand is incredible. The demand is incredible of how many customers and agencies we have coming and saying ‘We really want to use RPA as well.’”
