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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (1118920)	2/19/2019 6:41:20 PM
From: Sdgla	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573427

Trump’s call for budget efficiencies could accelerate RPA adoption By Jim Walker February 18, 2019 2:27 pm 5 min read 12 Shares In his October Cabinet meeting President Donald Trump directed agency secretaries to develop plans for an across-the-board 5 percent cut of their respective budgets. Even with the uncertainty around when Trump’s call for cuts will actually be executed, the order forces federal planners to immediately look for opportunities where unnecessary low-value activities can be eliminated or digitized to trim agency budgets. Regardless of what the final appropriated budgets may be, these budget decisions, rooted in the President’s Management Agenda, will become part of the annual congressional appropriations battle next year. The challenge to cut costs without reducing services always creates uncertainty during the planning process. Agency secretaries can address this daunting task by looking at a few of their forward-thinking colleagues who are already reducing costs while enhancing service by utilizing robotic process automation (RPA). Related Stories 4 bots relieve NASA employees from doing ‘low-value’ workAsk The CIO How robotics process automation is opening doors for agency innovation, transformationFederal Insights How GSA turned an automation project into an acquisition time-saverTechnology The U.S. government produces, manipulates and stores tremendous amounts of data every day. The collection, analysis, and movement of routine data are performed by more than 4 million federal employees, including postal employees and military members. Agency staff move and manipulate terabytes of data – processing everything from license renewals, weather data updates, to recalculating global financial reports. Insight by VMware: Export-Import Bank of the U.S. and U.S. Trade and Development Agency explore implementing a hybrid cloud solution in small agencies in this free webinar. The explosion of digital data and the thirst for more data collection and reporting has caused government agencies to require more staff to perform this robotic work. More people and more data storage are driving the cost of government business higher with no measurable, positive impact on the delivery of government services. While the president’s call for agency cuts established the goal line, a recent directive from the Office of Management and Budget provides the playbook for agencies to close the gap in achieving these budget reductions while simultaneously delivering better citizen services. The memorandum, titled “Shifting From Low-Value to High-Value Work,” reminds agencies that “each year, federal employees devote tens of thousands of hours to low-value compliance activities from rules and requirements that have built up over decades.” The memorandum also recommends agencies consider “introducing new technologies, such as robotic process automation (RPA), to reduce repetitive administrative tasks and other process-reform initiatives.” [Twenty-eight agencies have already put their robotic toes in the water. For example, NASA’s George Washington robot is helping the agency distribute funds provided by Congress in hours instead of days. At the General Services Administration, their robot, named Truman, is supporting the agency with pre-negotiation tasks – reducing to seconds what had previously taken an hour per task. For some agencies responding to the directive, the first hurdle is to understand what RPA is and what it can accomplish for them. RPA is software that is relatively easily trained by business staff and traditional programmers alike to mimic repetitive, transactional and rules-based tasks that consume tens of thousands of hours of agency staff time. Examples of this low-value work might include: RPA robots helping the Department of Veterans Affairs process medical records being returned to the agency following a new law allowing veterans to seek outside medical services.RPA robots serving as digital agents for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, to process routine customs documents, allowing agents to shift to higher-value tasks like inspections and interacting with citizens.The PMA along with the direction of the OMB memo will encourage continued expansion of RPA by early adopters such as GSA, NASA, Treasury, the Defense Logistics Agency, the Defense Information Systems Agency and the National Science Foundation. Lessons learned by these early adopters can serve as an opportunity to accelerate RPA implementation and the broader use of artificial intelligence. Some of those lessons learned include: Get early wins by picking the right pilot projects first. When you select your first RPA projects, these are some of the criteria you should look for: A task performed by five-to-10 people. You will get more efficiencies gained with more than just one or two beneficiaries of the robots eliminating their mundane tasks. And save the 500-person task robot for your second robot, after you have lessons learned by going through your first RPA pilot process.A task that is thoroughly documented, and if a good candidate task isn’t documented already, write down the process at the outset.A medium-complexity task. Don’t pick a process that is burdened by 50-plus business rules and only used by five staffers. A medium-complexity task will allow you to show success in the six to eight weeks needed to develop, test and deploy the robot. In a few months you’ll be saving staff hours and talking about your next deployment.Learning the ropes on a low-risk, high-reward project helps both staff and management to get comfortable with the RPA concept. Involve the chief information officer early. RPA is a business tool operated at the employee-level. But even though it is deployed “at-the-desk” it is still important for CIO involvement and oversight of the RPA work to provide virtual platforms and assure security worthiness. Partner early with the CIO for these foundational services.Learn more by sharing. GSA and the Defense Department are forming vendor-agnostic internal teams of RPA thought leaders to discuss RPA best practices and to develop playbooks to accelerate the use of RPA. These groups get smart on RPA faster by sharing what they know, which results in more efficient and successful deployment of their RPA program. Latest Technology News VA appeals modernization launch shows 'government working well,' agency saysVeterans Affairs Army begins study to change its talent management system to fit the futureArmy IC sharing an ever-growing portfolio of cyber threat dataStrategic Threat Intelligence Additionally, the incubation period for initial adopters is ending. The growth of these agency RPA projects should begin to scale on par with those experienced in the private sector. Employing attended and unattended robots, agencies will benefit from reduced processing times, eliminated backlogs, greater standardization of data and tighter cybersecurity. The studies by HFS and Deloitte suggest the federal government could save as much as $40-to-$80 billion if artificial intelligence is properly implemented across the government. An on-demand, versatile, and smart workforce of virtual employees offers to democratize how citizens consume government services. Using the latest technology, we can create a government workforce that is able to adapt and change to the ever-growing demands of a digital-friendly citizenry while reducing costs. The PMA and the OMB memo enable Cabinet agencies to adopt an automation first posture. By accelerating everything agencies can adopt and expand the use of RPA to more rapidly achieve the goals of the president’s five percent across-the-board reductions while improving government services. Jim Walker is director of public sector marketing for UiPath and the former RPA Lead at NASA shared services in Stennis, Mississippi. Copyright © 2019 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (1118920)	2/20/2019 7:49:45 AM
From: sylvester80	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573427

POLITIFACT: No, the Democratic Party didn’t create the Ku Klux Klan By Ciara O'Rourke on Wednesday, October 24th, 2018 at 11:20 a.m. politifact.com President Donald Trump has faced criticism for normalizing white nationalists but some conservative bloggers are trying to flip the script, shooing the Ku Klux Klan out of the "Big Tent" and into liberal territory. "I hate when people aren’t smart enough to realize that the KKK was formed by the Democratic Party," reads a Facebook post from Oct. 11, 2017. This post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) Though the post is a year old, it continues to circulate online, generating nearly 27,000 shares and 840 comments, many as recently as a day ago. "Just so you know," the post goes on, "the Ku Klux Klan’s original purpose was to oppose the Republican Party’s policies intended to establish economic and political equality for blacks (sic) folks after the Civil War." Facebook isn’t the only place this idea has spread. Back in 2013, Virginia State Sen. Stephen Martin also claimed that the KKK was created by Democrats. The Republican lawmaker soon retracted the statement after after PolitiFact Virginia started to investigate the origins of the KKK. Reporter Sean Gorman discovered then that the group’s founding is murky but that "historians generally agree it was founded by a handful of Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tenn. as a social fraternity and it quickly changed into a violent group that terrorized newly empowered black and white Republicans in the South." One historian confirmed there’s a historic link between the Democrats and the KKK: Many angry Southern whites during the 1860s and 1870s were Democrats, and some joined the KKK. But according to J. Michael Martinez, who wrote the 2007 book "Carpetbaggers, Cavalry and the KKK," it’s misleading to say the Democratic Party founded the Klan. It was a more of a grassroots creation, Martinez said. Plus, the Democratic Party of the past is not the Democratic Party of today. From the 1930s onward, "you think of the Democratic Party being considered the party of the disenfranchised," he said. Carole Emberton, an associated professor at the University of Buffalo, agreed. "Although the names stayed the same, the platforms of the two parties reversed each other in the mid-20th century, due in large part to the white ‘Dixiecrats’ flight out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964," she said. Back in the mid-19th century, various Klans in the South acted as a "strong arm" for many local Democratic politicians, Emberton said. The Confederate general believed to be the KKK’s first Grand Dragon even spoke at the 1868 Democratic National Convention. By the time the Civil Rights Act became law, the Democratic Party supported so-called liberal causes that "had been the banner of the Republican Party." While some Democrats supported the KKK, there’s no evidence the group was founded by their political party. And context matters—the anti-black Democratic Party of yore is not the party that Hillary Clinton belongs to today. We rate this statement False.