Advancing public service efficiency at the Austrian Ministry of Finance

Objectives: 

• Present a pilot demonstrating how AI can be implemented in the public sector in an ethical and transparent way to automate processes and improve citizen services 
• Identify how to modernize legacy IT investments and future-proof business operations to adapt quickly to new legislation and policies 

Solutions: 

• Deployed Unisys Smart Rule as a pilot to accelerate law as code processes via an AI-supported transparent rules extraction model 
• Managed design of an innovative solution with the potential to automate and enhance citizen services, including government benefits such as study grants and family funding programs

Results and benefits: 

• Faster, more cost-efficient and more accurate solution architecture 
• A focus on more critical value-add tasks 
• Elimination of the need for complex software updates and new application development efforts 

Business challenge: improve and accelerate decision-making for government services 

Government agencies are striving to adapt to a constantly evolving information environment where the public's demand for immediate and accurate online responses is at an all-time high.

The Austrian Ministry of Finance, which, like many public sector organizations, is experiencing a reduction in its workforce due to impending retirements and the resulting loss of institutional knowledge, started an EU-funded project with Unisys.

The goal of this project was to adopt innovative strategies with the use of AI to improve responsiveness and service delivery, particularly for legal texts such as study grants and family funding. 

Why Unisys?: trustworthy AI to enable effective decision-making 

Having had a long and successful history with public administrations in Austria and the EU, Unisys was the ministry’s first choice for developing an AI solution that fosters effective decision-making.

Unisys set out to automate and improve service delivery and ensure that the new system could be applied across other EU government departments and institutions. The Unisys Smart Rule solution illustrates the possibilities for combining data mining for rules extraction and process automation with AI. These law as code technologies have the potential to synthesize diverse and sometimes contradictory data elements into clear, actionable legal rules. 

In the pilot, Unisys presented an approach to how public administrations can accelerate the processing of study grants or family funding requests to offer quicker response times and more accurate resolutions while mitigating risk. Instead of a legal expert sifting through tomes of rules with no central source of information, Smart Rule can extract the pertinent information. Then, the legal expert can review the extracted rules to ensure accuracy. The resulting formal rules can be used to hyperautomate business processes. 

Results: hyperautomation of business processes with less human effort 

In cooperation with Unisys, the ministry delivered a pilot solution about ethical, transparent AI to hyperautomate business processes by extracting business rules out of legal text. This pilot illustrated the potential for: 

• More effective decision-making for comprehensive, transparent outcomes with a rule-based engine and trustworthy AI 
• Enhanced productivity and efficiencies with increased levels of digitization
• Increased employee focus on critical tasks by minimizing resource needs for repeatable business processes
• Reduced IT costs by preventing the need for complex software updates and new application development efforts 
• Streamlined access with a user-friendly unified solution for legal persons to validate extracted business rules 

After close cooperation with Unisys in this project, the ministry is embracing advanced technologies such as (GDPR-compliant) data aggregation, process automation and AI. This effort is focused on enhancing information management and simplifying complex legal frameworks. By transforming disparate data elements into coherent legal guidelines, it is possible to eliminate redundant tasks, streamline processes and improve accuracy, thereby ensuring a more efficient and reliable auditing process.

To explore how Unisys can deploy specialized expertise and advanced technologies to hyperautomate business processes, visit us online or contact us today.