Correspondence Management in Government — Technical Capability and Approach
Correspondence is no minor matter for government agencies, which routinely receive volumes of correspondence every year from many different channels, both in electronic form and physical mail. Responses are often required within a certain amount of time because of agency guidelines, congressional guidelines, or legal requirements.
In order to keep pace with modern standards, government agencies must find solutions that can automate request routing, increase correspondence efficiency, and improve responsiveness to constituents, while maintaining the highest security standards.
We’ve found that leveraging technology already in place reduces the level of effort and risk in delivering solutions. For example, we have implemented Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Apps on top of existing Office 365 and SharePoint implementations to extend what is already in place and proven. Doing so provides for automated, multi-channel correspondence management with SharePoint integration for document/records management and co-authoring.
Power Platform enables additional solutions via Office 365 and SaaS services, including:
● Barcode scanning without developer intervention
● User and system level integration using out-of-the box connectors for on-premises or cloud services
● Out-of-the-box portals with responsive web design to respond to mobile and desktop interfaces
● Business intelligence to identify bottlenecks and to increase internal and external transparency
We recently worked with a government agency that receives more than a million pieces of correspondence a year. Previously, the agency struggled to meet deadlines and lost track of coordination between departments.
We implemented a solution for both physical and electronic correspondence to track activities from receipt to response. Users can identify process trends and staff accordingly, with deep insights into the overall process so that they can take the right action at the right time.
We’ve also introduced cognitive services that help professional developers and business analysts add intelligent features to apps without having direct AI or data science skills. These include capabilities for text analytics and sentiment analysis. The text analytics function automatically tags key phrases in emails to be used in reporting and advanced searches. Sentiment analysis evaluates sentiment with scores and descriptive values. Users can then filter and sort messages based on sentiment and quickly respond to those that require attention.
