Intelligent Automation (IA)

Description

Summary of the work The Ombudsman intends to appoint a digital services partner to support Our Service to architect, develop, implement, manage and maintain Intelligent Automation (IA) processes and build in-house organisation structures and governance to take this technology forward. Expected Contract Length 6 months Latest start date Monday 7 March 2022 Why the Work is Being Done We are continuing to invest in our digital services to support the Ombudsman provide efficient and effective customer service (to both financial institutions and consumers). The Ombudsman needs a flexible technology service to allow it to respond to changes in the workforce, with respect to work locations, work patterns and scale. The Ombudsman also needs additional tools to improve operational efficiency and customer experience which it currently does not have, including intelligent automation (IA) for process efficiency. Problem to Be Solved Our objective is to establish its Intelligent Automation capability with a key focus on applying machine learning technologies in production. This will involve as a minimum: • Delivery of a scalable and secure production Intelligent Automation architecture in line with established designs • Defining the appropriate and operating model to support the production capability • Deploying a number of Machine Learning based Intelligent Automation proof of concepts into production • Working with business units to embed and begin to realise benefits associated with the new IA solutions • Building the Ombudsman’s capability in Intelligent Automation (including professional accreditation) to enable ongoing support as well as development of additional use cases • Determining the appropriate ongoing support and maintenance model for Intelligent Automation Who Are the Users The Financial Ombudsman Service was set up by Parliament in 2001 to resolve financial disputes. We can look at complaints about financial businesses and claims management companies, from consumers and small businesses, about a wide range of financial issues. You can find out more about the Financial Ombudsman Service on our website. We have over 3,500 employees and contractors, who are currently working remotely. Over two thirds of our people work in roles which focus on the resolution of complaints; with the remainder working in various support departments. Our jurisdiction covers UK business; all employees are based in the UK. We have offices in London and Coventry. Our customers need us to provide answers to their complaints in a timely fashion. To be able to do this we need to reduce time spent on manual processes – freeing time for our skilled staff to provide answers to our customers. Work Already Done To build an IA capability for the Ombudsman, we are following a 3-stage plan, the first two stages have been completed: 1) Proof of Concept: The Ombudsman has conducted several ‘proof of concept’ engagements to demonstrate the efficacy of IA. Complete 2) Develop Architecture: The next step of the process is to ensure that the Ombudsman has appropriate technical architecture and tools to enable the Ombudsman to build an IA capability. Complete 3) Establishing Organisational Capacity: These are the requirements of this procurement. Existing Team Our team is lead by our Head of Digital Technology and works closely with our Head of Business applications. We are building our internal development capability, part of this engagement is to help us establish technical and business operating models. Current Phase Not applicable Skills & Experience • Must have relevant experience of introducing automation with transaction systems (Please provide a recent example) • Must have experience of developing different IA Architectures (Please provide details of recent, relevant examples) • Must have experience of working in Public sector, with understanding of rules and obligations under which the organisation must operate. (Please provide recent examples, including project scope and outcomes) • Must be experienced in the journey to unlocking value from the technology deployed – alongside the technical deployment element. (Please provide a recent, relevant example, including benefits delivered) • Must have good stakeholder management and communication skills. (Please provide an example of when these skills have been levered to deliver an outcome) • Must have experience of adopting best practice to support an organisations understanding of the technology opportunities and the business case for change. (Please provide a relevant example) • Must have experience of working within GDPR regulations and delivering compliant solutions in relation to security and data protection. (Please provide a relevant example) • Must have experience of a variety of IA tools (i.e. not be ‘tied’ to a particular product) (Please provide examples) Nice to Haves • It would be good if the supplier has relevant certifications. Outline Microsoft or other relevant certifications that your organisation has and explain why they are beneficial to delivering IA technology. • It would be good if the supplier has experience in dealing with rapidly iterating requirements. (Describe how you have dealt with rapid iterations of requirements in delivering a project.) • It would be good if the supplier has experience of adoption with groups resistant to change. (Outline how you have designed IA ‘bots’ for these groups, overcoming challenges) • It would be good if the supplier can evidence organisation design and operating model experience and explain why they are beneficial here – alongside the ‘technical’ deployment. • It would be good if the supplier has an understanding of AI ethics and the challenges that poses to transparency and demonstration that the risk of bias is managed. Work Location Work can take place remotely and at Exchange Tower, London, E14 9SR. Working Arrangments Work can take place remotely and at Exchange Tower, London, E14 9SR. No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 3 Proposal Criteria • How well the proposed solution meets requirements as set out in the work order. (40% weighting) • Confidence that the delivery will be completed within the required timeline. (15% weighting) • The proposed delivery approach and methodology, including communication and stakeholder management (15% weighting) • How the supplier identified risks and dependencies and offered approaches to manage them (15% weighting) • Team structure (10% weighting) • Case Study (5% weighting) • Reference (P/F – used to validate responses provided) Cultural Fit Criteria • Take responsibility for delivering a successful outcome for the Ombudsman Service • Adopt a “one-team” culture. • Be transparent and collaborative when making decisions • A culture of quality assurance is embedded in the team • Be challenging of the Ombudsman Service where appropriate • Share knowledge and experience with other team members Payment Approach Capped time and materials Assessment Method • Case study • Reference • Presentation Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 65% Cultural fit 5% Price 30% Questions from Suppliers 1. Must have experience of working in Public sector, with understanding of rules and obligations under which the organisation must operate. (Please provide recent examples, including project scope and outcomes)This is non compliant with the DOS5 guidelines and discriminatory to bidders due to prior public sector experience ? Please elaborate. We have amended this question to the below to ensure fairness to all bidders. Experience of working in the public sector is not a requirement, however experience of working within a framework of rules and obligations (any sector) is required.New question:Must have experience of having to consider the rules and obligations under which an organisation must operate. (Please provide recent examples, including project scope and outcomes)Please note we are unable to amend the original question set, however responses to the above amended question will be treated equally. 2. Can you provide more detail on what technology has been shortlisted ? We have not finally decided on our technologies. We use Kofax, we have Microsoft products. We would consider other technologies. 3. What is the approximate budget & tenure to implement the solution? We envision a 6 month engagement. We are not sharing budget information at this stage. 4. Can we propose an offshore model? Subject to checks - an off shore model would be acceptable - although we are conscious this initial engagement is also about knowledge transfer and upskilling our staff. 5. Could you please summarise the outcomes of the first two completed stages, and in particular which IA POC outcomes have already been completed with the use of IA specifically (as opposed to regular automation)? We have successfully demonstrated that we can apply machine learning to automatically categorise cases. We have successfully demonstrated that we can automatically set up a new case from submission. 6. Who is the most senior active sponsor? CIO 7. Where in the organisation is the CoE Positioned? CIO Function 8. Is platform and application connectivity already established? Not at this time 9. Are IT and InfoSec already engaged and have approved the automation platform? Security, Data Protection and Technology are all part of the process for productionising this capability. 10. How will bots be supported ongoing? Is there a service management team to hand off to? The establishment of the organisation units to service and run 'Bots' is part of this engagement. 11. Is there a budget, and if so does it allow for scale or is it flat-rate across the 6 months? We are not sharing budget information at this stage. 12. How many processes have already been identified for automation potential? We have 3 proven use cases and further opportunities in ideation. 13. Will any PMO be provided? No, we will not have a PMO for this project. The Ombudsman has project standards and methodology which this project will need to adhere. 14. Will a comms team be provided? We have a strong internal communications function. 15. Will SMEs be readily available and have dedicated time to work with the programme? We anticipate strong Business engagement in this initiative 16. Do you have any specific objectives/targets for the 6 month engagement that we will be accountable for achieving? We are looking to our partner to propose the schedule and outcomes for review. 17. What is your definition of a Transaction system – please elaborate on systems in use? Our case handling system is Microsoft Dynamics 18. What RPA vendor has been selected? We have no RPA vendor - but use Kofax for our document automation. 19. How is it hosted (on premise, cloud etc)? We are cloud preferred 20. What in house capability do you have, will any of the CoE roles be filled with internal employees? We are building our digital and data science team. We have a Head of Digital in place and have a Project Manager and Change manager identified to support this initiative. We have some internal capability but look to develop further. 21. What scale/throughput do you anticipate (ie process automations/per month) – and how quickly do you want to scale to this level – this will determine the size of the CoE We will be interested to see the proposals. Each automation needs to be assessed for data protection, security and value before being activated. 22. What happens after 6 months? Handover to internal/stop programme? Subject to the success of the engagement we would seek coordinate with our internal capability being self sufficient. Potentially a taper model. 23. Regarding “Nice-to-have skills and experience” section question 4 – “It would be good if the supplier can evidence organization design and operating model experience and explain why they are beneficial here – alongside the ‘technical’ deployment”, can you elaborate the expectation from this question. This is not purely a technical exercise, but we wish to set up the right organisation structures with our business colleagues to ensure the technology is effective. Its about guiding and suggesting successful business operating models that can assist in unlocking the value from the technology. 24. Could you provide a high-level view of the technology stack preferred by the Financial Ombudsman in addition to the Microsoft stack? We are open to suggestions. We are cloud preferred, and our main transaction system is a microsoft product. We host some of our services in Azure. 25. What is the technology construct of Intelligent Automation in Financial Ombudsman? Is it pure AI / ML / NLP / DL etc. or a combination of these along with RPA or any other technology taxonomy? We are at the start of our journey. We will entertain all innovations that assist in the delivery of efficient and effective service. We are inclined to start with more simple constructs as we grow our maturity and management capabilities in this area. 26. Has there been a study on what currently takes the most time? We have some prior studies that have proposed areas where automation could be effective 27. Could we have more detail on the proof of concepts? There appears to be several languages mentioned across the RFP We have successfully demonstrated that we can apply machine learning to automatically categorise cases. We have successfully demonstrated that we can automatically set up a new case from submission. 28. Are there well defined standard metric definitions policies for data entry? We gather both structured data which can be subject to rules (for example - postcodes, telephone numbers) and unstructured data (for example - description of the issue). 29. Please can you clarify re must have experience of a variety of IA tools- do you mean specific tools or vendors? are you looking for experience with specific tools or specific vendors? We are looking to our partner to support our adoption of tools - and familiarity with these tools would be helpful. 30. Please can you clarify re experience of developing different IA Architectures- do you require cloud or premier? We are cloud preferred 31. Could you please clarify the part of the question in parentheses: are you looking for how resistance to automation has been overcome generally or how specific bots have overcome a group’s change resistance?1. Experience of adoption with groups resistant to change. (Outline how you have designed IA ‘bots’ for these groups, overcoming challenges) Could you demonstrate how you have overcome resistance to adoption - for example in a design - being able to show transparently how the 'bot' works how it can be managed how 'good' it is versus human actions. 32. We were intending on naming the clients in our examples, is this also your preference and can we confirm that the responses will be held confidentially? Responses will be held in confidence by FOS. 33. The overall guidance specifies one example per question but on a few questions it requests “examples”, are we right in saying for these we can provide multiple examples within the 100 words? Where we have requested examples it means at least 2 examples should be provided. 34. In what areas/departments of the organisation have the Proof of Concepts been completed? In our General Case work teams. 35. What vendors and technologies were used within the Proof-of-Concept stage? Information will be shared at the RFP stage. 36. Have any of the below metric(s) been used to measure the success of the Proof of Concepts? If not, please advise on how you measured the success of the Proof of Concepts?-Cost Savings/reductions-Time savings/reductions-Improvement in customer experience Time saving has been our primary metric. 37. Do you require the solution to be delivered in the cloud, on-premise or both? We are cloud preferred 38. Has the Financial Ombudsman already made investments / procured any IA tools? As previously stated - we have Kofax on our estate.