New Technologies Means New Federal Workflows
This is why: In an Industry 4.0 world, a product is less a product than it is a technology ecosystem. Some specific skills that people once created in the design and manufacturing process can be automated. The manufacturing facilities themselves can be automated or connected to outside networks; HVAC systems, for example, can report changes in temperature or energy usage to an offsite vendor or a utility company.
These process changes can fog visibility in the technology supply chain. Who programmed the robotic process automation that sorted the incoming data? Where does the vendor network connect other than my agency? Who vets patches that provide system upgrades?
This is important, not just to agencies, but to all organizations they trust as part of their secure supply chain. It’s going to be a new way of working, it’s going to be the way things are in the future, and everyone along the supply chain needs to understand this.
These new approaches promise improved readiness and effectiveness across all agencies. Embedded automation and more accessible technology should be made easier to use, even for a team that lacks its IT knowledge.
LEARN MORE: Microservices speed up federal government services.
The industry, for example, has begun to focus on a low-code/no-code approach to software development, giving agencies the tool to reduce staffing gaps. Not everyone can program, and not everyone can write or rewrite source code to achieve modernization goals.
Using the low-code/no-code approach, a worker whose primary job is not IT can use the machine learning built into the product and learn to gather and filter data without extensive training.
Agencies can see upgraded readiness and effectiveness in this new environment, as platforms that use less code can also have fewer bugs. With less code, agencies can also seamlessly integrate old and new solutions without having to rewrite their underlying – and also do so cheaper.
Even with staff who may not have all the IT expertise an agency needs or wants, the agency will see its agility improve as the Industry 4.0 environment lasts.
Integrating Technical Capabilities Means More Accurate Communication
These new capabilities allow agencies to collect real-time, real-world information on the status and location of their people, their assets, their equipment and their infrastructure and find out how they ready for their next mission, whether it be a military deployment or relief of civilians in disaster.
See all the organizations that need to communicate with each other during a natural disaster. They must get information quickly from one place to another and quickly scale up operations.
If they all have the same technical capabilities, the leading agency can include a small piece of code in its communications network, and at the touch of a button, send the same message at the same time to 15 other agencies, which can also pull from both feeds to provide information.
EXPLORE: ServiceNow solutions help agencies better monitor data.
New technology could also begin to develop predictive algorithms to help push help where it needs to go. It can determine which roads can handle heavy equipment, where supplies need to be placed in advance and how best to combine services from medical assistance to monitoring.
In this context, agencies can run simulations to see what the expected outcome of a plan is rather than relying on reports after the action – saving time, money and even possibly lives.
Common tasks can be virtually templated so end users don’t have to worry about building a process or project from scratch; andyan na ang basics. In a way, it’s like using data from your smart watch: At a glance, you can view your health status, your calendar, your to -do list, because someone else did the coding and preparation for you.
The government may not have an active role in Industry 4.0, but it can and will reap the benefits.
This article is part of FedTech‘s Capital blog series. Please join the discussion on Twitter by using #FedIT hashtag.
