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Document processing is an ever-increasing demand for government agencies, particularly as they invest more resources into extracting and leveraging seemingly endless amounts of data. Speed and efficiency have become more and more critical — the faster they can sift through the millions of documents that the government handles annually, the faster they can draw actionable insights.
As in many areas of operations, AI is a gamechanger for document processing. The ability to automate tasks that are currently manual; extract, categorize, and add context to data; and summarize, visualize, and present that data — all help to streamline the path from piles of documents to powerful, evidence-based decision making in a matter of hours instead of days.
Automation through AI produces numerous benefits, beginning with cost savings through operational efficiency, and tackles obstacles to effective document processing to deliver accuracy, scalability, and flexibility.
3 core challenges of document processing
Learn more about how Leidos and AWS are helping agencies transform document processing.
A managed services approach to transformation
Increasing efficiency is a core operational need — efficiency in terms of time, resources, and cost. As agency leaders combat the hurdles to doing more with less, managed services models become increasingly critical to operations. Approaching IT via managed services reduces burdens on government technologists by shifting support responsibilities to an external partner.
“When you go to a managed services model for document processing, customers don't have to worry about the hardware, software, and the tools underlying them,” said Srini Iyer, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for the Leidos Health and Civil sector. “It's like your monthly internet bill — you know what you're paying on a regular basis, and you know that you're going to have your internet working and available.
“Our partner in this initiative is Amazon Web Services (AWS), who publicly cites the benefit of managed services in their automation-first approach to operations for reducing human error and providing consistency, speed, accuracy, and savings” he continued. “According to AWS, customers receive an average annual operational and AWS cost-saving of 10-15%, and we see opportunity for even greater efficiencies across public sector document processing missions.”
Through a managed services approach to automation, Iyer said government technology teams can operate with several key benefits. First, cost savings through multiple avenues, such as increased accuracy and less rework, as well as the ability to scale up and down as needed, only paying for what is necessary. Second, greater operational efficiency by automating rote, repetitive tasks, which leads to another critical benefit: effectiveness. Automation-driven efficiency enables the human workforce to be more effective at executing tasks involving higher-level thinking.
“Third, and most important,” Iyer said, “staff can move from doing mundane tasks to executing more exciting, impactful work — maximizing human capital resources and cutting costs.”
Supercharge document processing with the power of AI
Three hurdles to optimizing government workflow automation reflect challenges that impact overall operations and management.
Limited human capital. Workforce shortages and skills gaps are perennial problems across government, particularly in the technology space.
Ever-increasing workloads. Even as agencies struggle with limited staffing, workloads grow. Documents, applications, reports, and, especially, data continue to pile up and must be processed, organized, and analyzed.
Manual processes. While short-staffed teams work to process these massive workloads, they are also slowed by manual processes, which are less efficient and more susceptible to error.
These three core challenges present the need for automation to reduce reliance on manual tasks and increase processing speed and accuracy. Of course, overburdened technology teams are not positioned to devote significant time and resources to implementing AI/ML into document processing workflows. There is significant demand for automation within government but bringing it to fruition often requires outside support.
When you go to a managed services model for document processing, customers don't have to worry about the hardware, software, and the tools underlying them.
Srini Iyer
Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer,
Leidos, Health and Civil Sector
The solution: ManagedX
Through decades of experience and expertise in the government space, Leidos recognized the challenges, opportunities, and potential benefits to integrating automation in document processing and found an answer: ManagedX.
ManagedX is an AI-powered, cloud-native solution developed by Leidos in collaboration with AWS. It integrates modular components throughout the document processing workflow, enhancing the entire support experience. The collaboration brings commercial capabilities and an outcomes-based approach designed to comply with federal regulations and compliance requirements. As a conduit for commercial technology, ManagedX is a demonstration of Leidos’ continual innovation with an emphasis on creating repeatable offerings.
“We’re bringing Leidos’ deep customer experience insights and mission understanding together with AWS’ cloud experience, and the plethora of tools, like Comprehend, SageMaker and Bedrock that AWS brings,” Iyer said.
The modular design of ManagedX allows it to meet agencies where they are, while tailoring to their unique needs. ManagedX brings the X-factor to agencies’ document processing workflows, with the goal of making them more efficient and producing more accurate outcomes. The robust global infrastructure of AWS also brings resilience, mobility, security — thanks to FedRAMP authorizations — and scalability, essential to government agencies often dealing with unpredictable and fluctuating amounts of data.
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“Elasticity is an inherent nature of the cloud,” Iyer said. “In many cases, we can add rules where it can automatically scale or collapse as needed, whereas when you buy physical hardware, it scales up, but then when the need goes down, it doesn't scale down. That collapse, that elasticity is not there.”
The cloud enables ManagedX to bring six key benefits to document processing workflows, beginning with that critical power to scale:
Scalability: Automatically adjusts resources based on demand.
Flexibility: Allows architecture to change easily with evolving needs.
Efficiency: Streamlines complex processes and reduces errors.
Visibility: Enhances observability and management of progress.
Cost Effectiveness: Only pay for what is used, lowering expenses.
Speed to value: Low infrastructure overhead, fast deployments and integration.
In addition to ManagedX, the partnership between Leidos and AWS has also produced Data ConnectiV, a data mesh accelerant. Data ConnectiV allows agencies to maximize the full power of their data and adopt an AI-ready enterprise data posture to meet the demands of an AI-powered technology landscape.
“Once we get past the digitization and into the data itself, we can get data from different sources and start running some analytics, and that is where Data ConnectiV fits in very well,” Iyer said. Data ConnectiV can help organize and manage data from disparate sources across an enterprise — finance, HR, logistics, electronic health records — bringing them together in a cohesive structure.
Leveraging tools like Data ConnectiV and ManagedX, agencies can create an ecosystem of solutions to prepare them to apply AI in increasingly advanced and effective ways — with boundaries in place designed to ensure it’s done accurately and responsibly. Leidos has its own algorithms and systems that learn continuously, supporting a higher level of confidence for results and mitigating the risk of hallucination.
“This is such a nascent field that having governance is absolutely critical,” Iyer said. “I see this evolving the next couple of years with more advanced AI, and the learning that goes into it is going to be so critical to enable us to automate so much more.”
