Flexibility is essential when implementing automation and digital transformation initiatives, speakers from the international public sector agreed at this week’s Appian Conference 2024 in London.

During a panel discussion at the event which explored how development organisations can boost service delivery and innovation through digital transformation and automation, Luca Curioni, director of citizen experience at Comune of Milan described the complexity of integrating automation in Milan, a city with 1.4 million inhabitants, and its shift towards creating a citizen experience.

Curioni emphasised the importance of flexibility and task prioritisation during the integration of a process orchestration, automation and intelligence platform, explaining how his team prioritised usability testing to understand when changes were needed to provide better results.

When implementing automation across its processes, Curioni said Milan chose a simple process “that would provide value and have a strong use case, with the goal being to critically improve the benefits and outcomes of several manual processes.

He added that the first process his team automated was the parking service for people with disabilities, with the new system managing to reduce the time from the previous manual process from three weeks to 13 hours.

“The Comune of Milan is now focusing on having a set of reusable sub-purposes with the pipeline including eight different areas, including tax department and policy department among other areas,” Curioni added.

David, Bates, head of IT and data at Social Work England agreed that in the public body’s automation rollout flexibility was prioritised, with the organisation following a process of building and then reflecting on the processes the organisation developed, rather than just implementing them rigidly.

“As we went through this iterative process, we were able to identify new opportunities and adapt our approach accordingly,” he added.

Bates added that Social Work England may also decide to make flexible changes to its priorities in the future as it identifies new opportunities within the organisation.

Hugh Wallace, chief information officer, research data at Research Data Scotland, an independent charity established by the Scottish government to help Scotland and the UK transform the public data research system, said that the organisation performs a lot of analysis on existing processes before automating them.

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