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Paper short abstract

Efforts to automate public administration tasks often create additional work, despite the aim of reducing and liberating human work. We show how public sector professionals assist software robots and introduce the concept of human-assisted automation to make this hidden labour visible.

Paper long abstract

Public administrations are increasingly digitalising their work processes and customer interactions to improve the (cost-)efficiency, reliability and accessibility of their services. This has led them to experiment with and implement automation technologies, such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and various AI tools. Although IT consultants advocate RPA robots with the promise that they will liberate human work for more meaningful and demanding tasks by automating simple, repetitive, and rule-based tasks, their implementation often fails. Our study critically examines software robots in action by asking what kinds of additional work they generate when used to reduce routine tasks.

Drawing on ethnographic methods and materials, we analyse two cases of RPA implementation in Finland. The first case focuses on an experiment conducted by the Tax Administration, which aimed to identify measures to improve the organisation’s efficiency and productivity by piloting software robots in three different tasks. The second case explores a software robot implemented by a Wellbeing Services County to automate a small phase of data work in primary healthcare. The organisational goal was to improve data quality while reducing the workload of data workers. Our findings show how tensions emerge between anticipated RPA capabilities and their actual performance, particularly when automation generates additional work rather than reduces it. To make this additional work visible, we suggest a concept of human-assisted automation. Based on the concept, we identify diverse forms of work that emerge as civil servants and other professionals need to assist automation to make these robots function properly.