Government Internal Audit Agency has been awarded funding from
the Government Office for Tech Transfer to further develop their
use of artificial intelligence.
The sharing of knowledge and best practice across government has
the potential to significantly improve the management of public
resources. A barrier to achieving this is collating, summarising
and extracting this information.Government Internal Audit
Agency’s (GIAA) audit function
covers 15 departments and over 120 arm’s length bodies
(ALBs), with thousands of
government documents that exist between them it would take a
large team a huge amount of time to read them, understand and
categorise them.
The knowledge asset solution
GIAA has developed
a tool called the Insights Engine which uses a branch of
artificial intelligence, called natural language processing, to
allow a person to read hundreds of documents at speed by
summarising, collating, and analysing content. They have been
using the technology to analyse Annual Opinion reports, which
enabled one person to review 102 reports in the same time it
previously took a small team to manually analyse 13
reports. GIAA received
funds from The Government Office for Technology Transfer
(GOTT) to
develop the Insights Engine even further, so that it can analyse
a wider range of government documents and identify
cross-government trends. With the developments, the Insights
Engine is able to:
- Identify key themes from network analysis of the documents
- Extract the most relevant paragraphs of text for a given
topic
- Produce interactive reports which summarise the findings
Who will this help?
- Government colleagues: being able to quickly read and process
hundreds of documents means insights buried in the reports and
data can be extracted quickly and trends can be spotted.
Understanding the trends will enable opportunities for
cross-government collaboration and learning to be identified.
- The taxpayer: as a result of sharing best practice across
government there is potential for improved public services.
Funding awarded
GIAA were awarded
£24,793 from GOTT to
develop the Insights Engine with extended capabilities for
exploitation beyond GIAA.
Outcome
The GIAA Insights
Engine has now been adopted by other government departments so
they too can reap the benefits from this knowledge asset. For
example HM Treasury and His Majesty’s Inspectorate of
Constabulary Fire and Rescue Services are exploring how they can
use the tool to improve their insight and reduce their workloads.
Quote from GIAA
Dr Iain McGregor, Director of Innovation and Development
at GIAA said:
Getting the grant from GOTT has
enabled us to develop the text network analysis which allows for
more refined use of the Insights Engine. We have since continued
to develop it ourselves, to incorporate more features for users,
but GOTT’s funding
has helped us in the journey to expand it across government.
Additionally, our dedicated point of contact at GOTT has
given us helpful suggestions and helped refine our approach.
Next steps
GIAA are
continuing to develop and promote the use of the Insights Engine
across government, to enable better use of knowledge and greater
efficiency in the use of public money.
