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Anthony Jimenez
Welcome back to CarahCast, the podcast from Carahsoft, the trusted government IT solutions provider. Subscribe to get the latest technology updates in the public sector. I'm Anthony Jimenez, your host from the Carahsoft production team.On behalf of QFlow Systems, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast, focused around QFlow's QAction platform. Dr. Andrew Hutson will discuss how federal agencies can overcome staffing shortages and evolving challenges without compromising their missions.
Emily Nava
Hi, everyone. I'm Emily Nava, head of marketing at QFlow Systems. I'm joined here today with Dr. Andrew Hutson. He needs no introduction, but the COO of QFlow Systems.
Dr. Andrew Hutson
Hey, thanks for having me. I'm excited for our topic today.
Emily Nava
Yeah, absolutely. So, we're talking about what it means to uphold the mission, even as federal agencies face some staff turnover, shrinking budgets, and growing demand. So, I'm just going to jump right into the questions here.
Dr. Andrew Hutson
Let's do it.
Emily Nava
So, let's start with what you're seeing across government right now. What are some workforce trends that you've observed, especially around staffing and workload?
Dr. Andrew Hutson
Yeah, I can't be too specific. Just the nature of the type of information I have access to is likely not public, and I certainly wouldn't want to put any of my friends in an awkward position. But I can talk about the broader trends.We can see the immediate impact DOGE has had on staffing, not just with layoffs, but with early retirement that seems to be, at least with our interactions, the biggest disruption that agencies have been facing right now. At the same time, while the number of resources, folks, people, humans, that are available to work on specific mission areas has decreased, the scope and size of the mission areas have not. And that's presenting some very burdensome situations, and it made me think about a term that probably goes outside of private sector and works just fine here with public, but a term called corporate amnesia.This is something that was talked about a lot with layoffs or with an aging workforce, that there's just all of this knowledge that goes away as folks retire or staffing decreases. The extent to which that that happens is variable, but I'm starting to see it with our federal customers where folks just don't know exactly who to go speak to yet. They're uncertain on the processes that they used to know, and are they still valid today?And tasks that have traditionally been assigned to the roles that folks have, they haven't been trained up on how to do them, and that's because they were reliant on others that could own different portions of the processes. So, all these are kind of combining together and create delays and errors and even interpersonal conflicts where folks have disparate expectations of what people should own and how they should be showing up.
Emily Nava
Yeah. I mean, you answered a few of my questions with that great synopsis of what you're seeing out there. Why are the traditional processes that might have worked when they were fully staffed, why are they struggling to keep up now?
Dr. Andrew Hutson
Oh, that's a great question, and I won't take the immediate example. I'll go back years to some work that I did with the state of Alabama and their Medicaid process. When something changes on the demand or the supply within a given system, it has to compensate somehow.You can't continue to do the same process in the same way if demand or resources change. So, the Medicaid example, with a new legislation that had passed at the time, the number of eligible folks, citizens in Alabama that would be covered by Medicare and Medicaid doubled. The processes that they had in place were there to keep up with the current workload and didn't scale very well.If you go to the opposite of that and say, I had a process where the demand is continuing the same, but the number of resources applied to that process has decreased, you have a similar problem. It can't scale to the increased demand. So, one option is to decrease the supply that you're providing on this particular process by the same rate that your number of resources has decreased.But if your mission doesn't change, you can't really do that. So, then you have to find alternative methods to capture what had traditionally been done manually to try to be done using something else. And I am alluding to some type of computer automation.
Emily Nava
Automation, why we're all here, right? So, what does smart automation look like in the public sector? It can sound kind of intimidating or abstract.So, what could that really look like?
Dr. Andrew Hutson
Let me ask you some questions. So, I'm going to go back to graduate school and three types of decision support systems that existed out there. And for our purposes, we can tie this back to automation.So, the first kind is called case-based decision making. Could you imagine what that means?
Emily Nava
I imagine it means looking at past examples of something similar.
Dr. Andrew Hutson
That's exactly right. Nailed it. First try.Nice. And so, it's basically saying here is a fully defined event, a case, and how closely does this current event or case match? Okay.So, it's a similarity comparison. The next is rule-based. What do you think that means?
Emily Nava
If this happens, this happens always.
Dr. Andrew Hutson
Perfect. Perfect way to say it. If this, then that.I think there's even an app out there that's called that. Very clear, very black and white. Here's a rule.It's either followed or it's not. Very nice for computers, not always great for processes. So now we have the third kind, probabilistic-based.What do you think that means?
Emily Nava
Probably a combination of the two, looking at a larger sample of similar cases and deciding the best course of action based on those outcomes.
Dr. Andrew Hutson
I mean, that's pretty good too. Well, you almost like you're an expert. The probability-based systems are saying, what is the probability of the next best step given past rules and cases?If we fast forward to, and that's like 20 years old. Okay. Yes.That far back. If we come to today and we think about LLMs and we think about automation, we think about how those things work together, they're really kind of still the same. So, automation on a process is a step-by-step or a state-based, where we're saying perform action, then based off of that action, go to the next step.And that could be a decision point or a very clear one directional step. And we can start to build this image in our head of steps and triangles and business process notation. That works great for rules.And then for cases, we have something like a vector database where we can put all of our cases into a database and give it a new case that is unique in and of itself. And it will pull back similar cases and uses something called cosine similarity. Then you go to an LLM.Well, the entire framework of a training model for LLM is using probabilities. LLMs work by saying, based off of the context provided, here is the most likely next token, or we can think of it as words or word parts that should be generated based off of that information. And you can pull all these together and with rules and with cases and with vectors and with LLMs, start to create smart automation that can combine these things together to create a desired result that may be similar to or close enough to how a person might perform a similar activity.But can you guess where this falls apart?
Emily Nava
When there's no oversight.
Dr. Andrew Hutson
That's a great one. No oversight, which means the system is just allowed to chug along and no one is saying, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It can also go really bad if the cases are incomplete or incorrect.
Emily Nava
So bad data.
Dr. Andrew Hutson
Yeah. So bad data hurts this. And guess what people traditionally are not really good at when they're doing a process?
Emily Nava
Keeping data clean.
Dr. Andrew Hutson
Yeah. They're not really good at writing down all the instances where this did or didn't work. And we're really seeing that back with our customers, and this is rampant whether it's private or public industry, so we're not picking on anybody, but the ability for these smart automations to work effectively, if it's predicated on how much has been captured and how well it's been captured, well, if everything's in an email inbox, for example, and no rhyme or reason, or worse, there's tons of rhymes or reasons depending on which department or missionary you're in. Or the person.Or, yeah, then we even have the person anomaly where, and we've all probably done this, oh, man, this was a really good idea six months ago, but I want to switch it up now.
Emily Nava
Yeah. This process works for me, but.
Dr. Andrew Hutson
This process works for me. Yeah. How many developers have we talked to and said, well, it works on my machine?
Emily Nava
Yeah.
Dr. Andrew Hutson
All that just makes it murky and difficult to try to fix, and that's why educating on how these systems can work is that much more important because it will change the behaviors on all these ancillary activities and data capture points that everybody's working with to help make that smart automation better.
Emily Nava
Okay. Well, I mean, that sounds all well and good, but a lot of agencies aren't set up to have smart automation for all the reasons that we just listed. So how can agencies adopt this smart automation without ripping and replacing legacy systems just altogether?
Dr. Andrew Hutson
Well, it gets harder, right? So, the first thing that they have to consider is standardizing to some extent. So that takes commitment and discipline to create the habits for standards.That might be more plausible in a public sector setting, but it isn't guaranteed. It really does take leadership and buy-in from those performing the work to follow those standards. But standards aren't enough because you have to integrate with these existing systems that are out there now to make sure that standards are consistent and you can pull in the relevant information across these different products.Once you have that set up, you can introduce something called automation. Now, you may go out of sequence and say, I'm going to start with automation, Hutson. I'll work on these other things as I go, and that's fine.You can even use automation to help start to enforce standards, to create consistency and processes at a low level. You can use automation and rules to ensure that data entry is consistent across your disparate systems. But kind of the trifecta, the power triangle that I'll say right now is that standardization, automation, and integration to help folks actually get value from their data and help them with their work.
Emily Nava
Absolutely. You mentioned a few, data entry, standards, enforcement. I guess you could call those workflows, but what other types of workflows would be ideal to start automating for, let's say, an agency that hasn't before?
Dr. Andrew Hutson
So, then you start to look at the low, everybody's already heard this, right? The low hanging fruit. What does that mean?You look for those things that are already prone to consistency. So, I'll give you a healthcare example, anesthesiology. That is a perfect example often used when we're talking about automation and systems, because the calculations and dosages and approaches and metrics and monitoring, all are consistent.And because they're consistent and repeatable in multiple settings, it can be monitored and automated and standardized much more quickly. But if let's say we go into something like a loan process, same deal. The steps by which a loan process has to follow are relatively unchanging.You still have to meet certain thresholds and criteria. There's certain paperwork that has to be filled out. There's updates along the way.There's follow-up. There's people that are involved. There's approvals.All these different things all have to happen in the same way each time. So that's a perfect opportunity to say, let me integrate with the systems. Let me codify the process.And then let me establish the standard. Gotcha.
Emily Nava
Okay. Yeah. So, they can just look at their processes overall and say like this one, we've actually got it written down to some extent.
So, let's just automate these phases. And like you mentioned, the loan processing, of course, there's going to be anomalies, but that has to hit these certain milestones every time.
Dr. Andrew Hutson
Anomalies are the thing that always comes up, right? Almost feels like that's the end of the conversation. And that can feel that way a lot, but that's really majoring in the minor.Anomalies will happen and you need to be able to account for them. But if anomalies are a majority of what's happening, they're not really anomalies anymore.
Emily Nava
Like maybe you need to take a look at where those are happening so much.
Dr. Andrew Hutson
And so maybe you can only automate 80% of your process because everything else needs to be unique to the circumstance. Well, that's still 80% that's automated.
Emily Nava
Exactly.
Dr. Andrew Hutson
And it leaves you room for that other stuff. And then you might find that there is actual room for automation in that 20%, but you couldn't see it before because the 80% was distracting you. We call that the whirlwind here internal a lot.The whirlwind of the day-to-day can distract from the improvement you need.
Emily Nava
So, I kind of want to go back to what we started talking about, beginning of upholding the mission. So, the mission doesn't end. If people are laid off or retire early, that doesn't mean the mission, like you said, changes.It certainly doesn't end. So that's something that really resonates with federal workers. But what does that mean?And how does a company like QFlow help agencies stay on track, even when those resources are limited?
Dr. Andrew Hutson
One of the great things about the folks we get to work with is their dedication to the mission. That they have knowingly and willingly dedicated their life to serving the American people. Many of the folks that I meet not only work for the agencies that we work with, but they started off in the military.And they have a profound sense of duty to the mission at hand. And so, when you speak with these folks and they say the mission doesn't end, it isn't a throwaway statement. It is impactful.It is them saying it does not matter that we don't have the resources to make this easy, the mission doesn't end. And they feel this incredible responsibility to the American people. And so, when we talk about in practical terms for the federal agency, there's so many things that any agency provides to Americans that they still are obligated to provide, regardless of the number of people available to provide it.And so, they really want to step up in a great way and find how they can still meet the demand with the resources they do have available. And that's where we try to come in and help. We try to come in and help by introducing easy tools for constructing workflows, try to make it really approachable for folks that don't have coding background, make things drag and drop, very visual, very familiar, and ultimately inspectable.I'm not sure if that's a word, but someone can look at this and read it in the same way as someone else on the team and understand how the process works. That's a critical element in any type of process improvement, as well as continuity. Because if that process is readable by virtually anyone, then as there is turnover, as there is retirement, the knowledge of how the process is supposed to operate can be not only understood, but improved or modified as needed, as things change either with legislation or mission areas or focus or external factors that can impact the system.
Emily Nava
Totally. Incredible answer. So, if an agency is wanting to start to explore automation, or maybe they already have and they're having some trouble, what's one thing that they could do today?
Dr. Andrew Hutson
Well, the best thing they should do is reach out to their technology office, because likely there are tools already available that they can use. We're in the same boat. We are a service that's cross-industry.We're available on Stratus that you can get our licenses that you can use. We have authority to operate with the DOD, as well as other agencies. We are here not only to help with the technology, but also with the people.So we don't provide staff augmentation, but we do provide training, consulting, and support as part of our licensing structure, because we know just technology adoption is so much easier when you have someone that knows the tech and is immersed in the domain knowledge in which you're working. So that would be my first recommendation, is to reach out and see what tools are there. You can also reach out to us.You can even knock on my door, virtual door, and come ask me about it, because there's likely some tool that hasn't been leveraged that's available to you right now.
Emily Nava
And so, you kind of touched on a big point about support and adopting new technologies. Without that support is very, very hard. So, if I'm a CIO or IT leader for an agency, and I'm looking for a new partner or platform, I'm assuming making sure I'm going to get the support I need is definitely something I should look for.Is there anything else that I should be looking for when it comes to selecting a partner?
Dr. Andrew Hutson
Yeah, I would talk with partners. And something that's always important to me is more than just do they have support, because everybody has support. It's how are you going to help my staff be successful with this software?How are you going to prepare them now and in the future to get value from putting their work on this platform? Those are really important questions that I think are often missed or certainly delayed in their response. It's just not in our DNA to go along with that.We have a lot of veteran software professionals on our staff that we've earned all the scar tissue of all the ways not to do something. And how we can help best is all that learning that has been done really comes down to the people. You probably have all heard this to some extent.There's people, process, technology, put these things together. But the people side, I think, is often misunderstood because it's not just do you have the right people for your process? That's not really it.It's are you helping and supporting the people in the process with the technology? Too often, we go to the tech. Then we try to find people who are experts in the tech and then give them the process.But that's just not feasible in most scenarios. And that's wrought with failure. What's better is get the people that know the technology and pair them with the people that are performing the work.Have them work collaboratively, put the experts in a support role. Not only that, but a consultative role to answer questions as they come up throughout the adoption process, as well as the maintenance process. When you have those in place, the success of the adoption increases and the return on investment is actually realized.When you don't do those things, you're going to spend a lot of money. And at the end of a couple of years, you're going to look at the outcomes and it's going to be nowhere near you thought they would be two years ago.
Emily Nava
And then you're canceling that contract.
Dr. Andrew Hutson
And then you're starting the process over again to waste more money. It's hard to see when you're in it and easy to say, looking at it from the outside.
Emily Nava
Exactly. All right. Well, we're about at time here, but before we wrap up, I wanted to ask you, what excites you the most about the future of workflow automation in government right now?
Dr. Andrew Hutson
I think, one, that there's so many different agencies that are adopting AI, and that's a very broad term, to projects that they have. And what that means is they're opening the door to try to leverage these tools in the best way for the American people. And so I'm stoked about it because understanding all of this pre-work that's been done before, calling back to our probabilistic rule-based and case-based decision support systems, being able to have something like an LLM reliably partner with people, can't replace, but in my view, they can partner, to help increase the speed and quality of outcomes is really exciting.And how those can be folded together in a secure and performant way for our federal agencies, man, it's like an awesome spot to be right now, because it's just, it almost feels like magic.
Emily Nava
I agree. It's been really fun having these conversations with people and hearing how they're also excited about implementing these things in their mission areas. So, I wanted to take a pause here and say, for those of you listening who are interested in hearing more conversations like this between me and Dr. Hutson and some other guests, QFlow also hosts their own podcast. It's called The Interconnectedness of Things. You can find it at QFlow.com/podcast. We talk about things in healthcare, federal government, definitely automation, AI, all the tech goodness.So if you liked this conversation, I urge you to go over to QFlow.com/podcast. And give us a listen over there. So, Dr. Hutson, thank you so much for talking with me today. It's been a really great conversation.
Dr. Andrew Hutson
Always a blast, Emily. Can't wait for the next one.
Anthony Jimenez
Thanks for listening. And thank you to our guest, Dr. Andrew Hutson. Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe to CarahCast.And be sure to listen to our other discussions. If you'd like more information on how QFlow Systems can assist your organization, please visit www.Carahsoft.com/QFlow or email us at QFlowSystems@Carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.