OpenText: Practical AI in the Public Sector. #techUKDigitalPS

The press is caught on a wave of interest about Artificial Intelligence and the potential impact on our daily lives. Organisations are scrambling to capitalise on its abilities and what this means to the ordinary employee and the ordinary citizen.  

The concept of AI has been around since the 1950’s and implemented in various forms since then. Today, the increased processing power available to us and access to vast amounts of digital content has finally offered the possibility of significant benefit to both commercial and public organisations. 

Whilst large language model (LLM) and chat-based AI is bleeding edge technology, it uses established capability that OpenText works with on a daily basis to deliver value to our customers. A large UK Central Government department is using it to further their journey to digital agility, enhanced productivity, and significant cost savings using AI enhanced, content analytics. 

AI content profiling 

It starts with decades of confidential information trapped in paper and other traditional archive systems. OpenText solutions are used to scan and create a digital format placing it into a secure, private repository. Optical Character Recognition is not a new concept but capturing high quality information from mixed format documents has always needed manual intervention.  

AI enhanced capture constantly ‘learns’ the content of your information as it is processed. Detecting different structures of information, AI classifies content, identifies key pieces of relevant information, and analyses the text to build up a profile.  

This enhanced understanding discovers known concepts, sentiment, specific people, places or locations. AI allows us to detect if this is a complaint or a service request, recognise relationships to other people and identify entities that are often hidden away in the body of the text. somewhere. 

These profiles are then used to intelligently process all future information that is captured so an evolving picture is incrementally constructed and used to automatically process incoming content. Initially used to reduce the manual intervention of the capture process, it dramatically improves throughput, quickly freeing up physical storage and improving access. But this is just the beginning... 

Asking questions of your private information 

Applying this type of contextual profiling to your internal repositories means that AI can build a more enriched and complete picture of the information you already hold. This is particularly powerful when linked to a business process that requires investigation. As part of making decisions about cases involving citizens, the intelligent retrieval can be linked to a Case Management process where users are suggested relevant information, possible links are highlighted, and key pieces of data can be discovered without even opening a document.   

Legacy systems are not excluded: our customers decommission old, unsecure applications which are often only being kept for reference purposes.  The historical data is securely archived whilst adding AI profiles to extract and add value to the investigation process. 

These new LLM and chat systems are moving away from ‘search’ and heading towards simply asking questions of a tool that has read all your data and can provide informed, referenceable answers.  What if this capability was linked to a process that automatically asked preliminary questions and returned responses and references based on your own confidential data? Safely, security filtered, and relevant to the users as part of the systems they currently use.

This article was written by Nick Lund, Sales Director Director at OpenText. As a Sales Director at OpenText, Nick Lund is responsible for key accounts across Public Sector working with customers to support their information management programmes for increased operational efficiency, cost reduction and improved customer service. The role involves solutions across the whole of OpenText's Enterprise Information Management portfolio - including content management, enterprise asset management, mobile working, Business Process Management, social media and integration with both Microsoft and SAP environments. His passion lies in making a genuine difference and informing and supporting organisations as they tackle information-led challenges within their business. The majority of challenges faced by any company arise from managing and deriving benefit from the huge quantities of content they own as well as making sure their processes are being run in the most efficient way. Outside of his day-to-day work, Nick particularly enjoys playing golf or being on stage, when he is not currently walking his dog with his wife or looking after their rescue chickens in the garden. Connect with Nick via LinkedIn.

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