Australia, Oct 5, 2020
The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is a government department responsible for health, ambulance services, families and children, youth affairs, public housing, disability, ageing, mental health and sport policy in the state of Victoria, Australia. The department provides many services directly to the community through its operational divisions, located across 17 areas of the state. Each division covers a mix of rural outer-metropolitan and inner-metropolitan areas of Victoria. They fund almost 2,000 other organisations to deliver vital health and human services care.
DHHS has a total of 11,000 employees supporting their mission across Victoria. Those employees are supported by a central Corporate Services team which provides a number of critical back end shared services including significant technology projects so that DHHS can do its job in the community effectively.
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Challenge
There were zero challenges in the creation of Evie the Bot, except for the integration of Evie into Yammer which traditionally doesn’t support a Bot framework. Logicalis was able to accomplish this integration by using Microsoft’s Power Automate (Flow) to ensure the workflow was there to create new questions and answers directed to the project team; that’s if the current Q&A wasn’t already found in the knowledge base.
The DHHS management team had no reservations about using AI to supplement the resource challenges and they were excited to try out something new that would save costs and time for both the service support centre team and the users with questions. Overall it helped productivity enormously
Solution
The goal of the bot was happy end users and increased user adoption for the Windows 10 rollout. As for the early rollout stages, we can now give a big tick to both. Evie now lives on Yammer, DHHS’s Collaboration platform and is integrated with Teams and SharePoint for ease of searching the knowledge repository.
The creation of virtual communities on Yammer including Chatbots is a great showcase for what automated technology can do, it eases employees in gently and allows them to be more productive, getting the answers they need in real time rather than 9am till 5pm.
Benefits
An added benefit is the cost saving of having one full time headcount assigned in helpdesk support. The technical support people in Sarah’s team can now focus on more demanding projects and implementations, keeping the great work that DHHS is doing, continuing at pace and at scale.