Anil Cheriyan, head of the General Services Administration’s (GSA’s) Technology Transformation Services unit (TTS), shared details today on his office’s new work in the areas of robotic process automation (RPA) and identity proofing.
Speaking at ATARC’s Government Information Technology Executive Council (GITEC) conference, Cheriyan listed out the core competencies of TTS. While most of those are familiar to folks who know TTS’ work, two of them are recent additions to the organization’s offerings.
“Two new ones we have that are on the docket – one is what I call Intelligent Process Automation, which is really RPA with AI [artificial intelligence] … and the last one is identity,” he said.
Cheriyan recalled his time as CIO at SunTrust Bank and implementing RPA there.
“In my experience, what we did at [SunTrust] Bank is we had over 30 bots put together, with about 300 in the pipeline. This is a real way of driving progress without having to reengineer all the systems. When you talk about modernizing processes, that’s a very useful tool that we need to build on,” he said.
In the identity space, TTS is still in the early stages, but sees a strong opportunity, he said.
“This is the huge opportunity I think we have in Federal government, because when I was in the banking industry, we looked at identity fraud as a really big issue,” Cheriyan said. “Pretty much all the bad guys know your Social Security number, so it’s a question of how you do real identity and identity proofing,”
In addition to the new capabilities, Cheriyan also reported progress across TTS in the long-standing core competencies of customer experience, data center migration and cloud, data analytics, acquisitions, and accelerators.
Cheriyan also touched on the push for a culture change at TTS, with a focus on results.
“The main cultural change that we’re driving towards is delivering success with quality, and delivering outcomes,” he said. “The question that I keep asking is ‘So what?’ What does that really mean for the citizens of the country? What is the real outcome? What is the real benefit? It’s a cultural change that has to occur here, in my opinion,” Cheriyan said.