Digital workforce takes up work

At the end of last year, representatives of the start-up company Evolv contacted the City of Hafnarfjörður and wanted to introduce a service that they believed would be well-suited to the municipality. Evolv could offer a solution equivalent to a member of staff and not only that, but a member of staff who could work 24 hours a day, all year round, or so-called digital labour (Robotic Process Automation).

At first, this sounded too good to be true. At Hafnarfjörður Municipality, we have striven in our digital development to be unafraid to take steps with start-ups, including participating in innovation competitions with the National Procurement Service. There, representatives from Evolv have presented themselves and their projects, just like us, but from opposite ends of the spectrum.

At the beginning of the year, we received a further presentation and were particularly impressed by what Evolv had to offer. We were given project proposals for two projects, one working in the finance department and the other partly in the service desk. One was creditor reconciliation and the other, enquiries about property taxes. Both are very suitable tasks for a robot and, at the same time, not at all exciting for a human. The digital workforce mimics the actions of staff, works with the company's existing systems and can utilise machine learning and artificial intelligence. It frees up staff from repetitive and often tedious tasks. The solution does not require expensive software development and is therefore not particularly expensive or complex to implement. Of course, a key to the project's success is having a solid analysis, clear processes, a secure technological environment, and robust access control.

Due to other commitments, this work did not get underway until the spring, and the digital officer started work in early July 2023.  As the collaboration progressed, more project ideas emerged and this year Bjarni Sívertsen, the digital employee is named after the man who has been called the father of Hafnarfjörður, worked on four projects:

• Settlements with over 700 creditors
• Responds to requests for property tax information
• Responds to requests for transaction history
• Merge PDF documents for staff

More projects are under consideration to be entrusted to Bjarni Sívertsen in the coming quarters, and the first ones are certainly promising. The plan is to hold workshops with staff to identify further opportunities and projects for Bjarni. Particularly concerning the processing of enquiries or requests, the processing of applications, service processes for residents, further financial processes such as fund management, and various human resources processes.

It is pleasing to see that more municipalities are starting to use this service, as there is an obvious benefit for Icelandic municipalities in using this solution. In the case of creditor reconciliations, this results in a huge time saving, allows for a significantly greater number of creditors to be reconciled than before, and makes the accounts more accurate. A request for property taxes is another task, but the large number of such requests received by the town from estate agents simplifies the task. It does not distract service centre staff from other tasks; instead, the digital employee handles the matter quickly and securely.

In summary, the main advantages of implementing a digital workforce are as follows:

• The return is quick; in effect, a new employee who doesn't draw a salary and works with systems that are already in place.
• The digital employee works with greater precision and speed than we can.
• Staff are utilised more effectively and do not have to deal with „boring tasks“, but can instead concentrate on more valuable and rewarding projects, which results in increased job satisfaction.
• The projects are easy to scale; you can start small and build upon them.

Sigurður Davíð Stefánsson from Evolv presented the projects at The Association of Icelandic Municipalities' conference on digital development. A recording of the talk can be found below, where Sigurður shows how a digital workforce does its work, and it is safe to say that no human can work at the same speed.

Digital municipalities – Digital Officer of Hafnarfjörður – Sigurður Davíð Stefánsson from Association of Icelandic Municipalities on Vimeo.