The pandemic sped up public sector initiatives for more digital services to enable faster service delivery and affordability, and Xerox is helping its federal clients meet customer expectations and transition to a digital experience today and in the future.
“I get the chance to speak with many IT government leaders, and they’re all motivated to roll out more digital government,” said Brian Castle, vice president of federal operations at Xerox. “The pandemic really accelerated that transformation as government agencies scrambled to consistently offer services to their constituency in an ever-more increasing digital format.”
The pandemic gave government room to expand and advance in giving citizens digital services. Agencies, like most businesses around the nation, had to quickly shift to remote work environments and provide online services. They were forced to fast-track IT transformation initiatives.
And while these efforts were intensified, Castle said they weren’t necessarily new: Government agencies have invested in digital services for years. At its core, Xerox’s mission of helping its clients solve their critical business issues hasn’t changed, either.
Xerox’s History of Innovation
Castle joined Xerox in 1997 after spending several years in outside sales positions. The Washington, D.C.-native graduated from George Mason University with a degree in English in 1995 with an interest in teaching. But after gaining valuable leadership experience as a member of the Army National Guard, he refocused his professional pursuits.
“When I graduated from college, I opted for a sales position in marketing technology, had initial success and never changed course from there,” Castle said.
Castle joined Xerox looking to sell more comprehensive, complex solutions. He started as a client manager supporting the commercial space in the Washington, D.C., region, marketing technology and base-level services. He’s now approaching 25 years with the company.
“I was always interested in technology,” he said. “Xerox has been a worldwide technology and innovation leader for decades. I thought it would be a great place to continue my career.”
The company has evolved in those 25 years, bringing new and exciting innovation to the market.
“People think about Xerox with a strong brand name synonymous with copy and print,” Castle said. “However, we also bring to market solutions such as 3D technology, robotic process automation, augmented reality, among other things.”
Throughout his career with Xerox, Castle served in product and service specialist roles, supporting commercial, public sector and federal clients. He spent time in sales management and in senior leadership positions at the headquarters level, supporting the global document services business across the U.S. and leading strategy with enterprise clients. Most recently, he moved into roles leading some of Xerox’s larger sales organizations.
After four years of leading the Northeast public sector organization, Castle moved into his current role heading nationwide federal sales. Today, his team supports Xerox federal customers across the country, including state and local clients in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.
And through Castle’s many different roles, the objective has always been the same: Help clients solve their unique business challenges.
“How do we make them more effective or efficient and enable them to deliver on their mission, whatever that may be, whether it’s an industry client, whether it’s a federal or state and local client?” Castle said. “That certainly has evolved considerably over the past 25 years.”
Today, Xerox is heavily focused on its clients and their mission-critical business processes, in addition to technology. Services such as software solutions and workflow analytics help improve internal and external client experiences.
Castle focuses on supporting clients through their digital transformation journey.
“We do that through offering solutions around digital capture and transformation of information,” Castle said. “We do that through automating laborious workflows and digitizing those workflows. We do that by managing and storing content for our clients and enabling multichannel communication.”
Amplified Appetite for Digital Services
Agencies have always had an appetite for improving digital services, and Xerox has been there to help. Yet, over the past year during the closures and restrictions, they have seen a significant shift in citizen expectations around government services.
During the pandemic, unemployment claims skyrocketed, Paycheck Protection Program loan applications flowed in and the need for digital channels for citizens to engage with such programs increased.
“As citizens, we’re smart from a technology standpoint and we expect our government to be so as well,” Castle said. “Because of this, the government did have to accelerate quickly to provide digital services that citizens could easily access.”
Agencies are centering on digital optimization over full-blown transformation, with a roadmap that incrementally and continuously delivers tangible value while increasing digital capabilities and maturity over time. Castle said he’s seen agencies prioritize their efforts around security, data protection and digital improvement of existing processes to reduce the cost of services and operations.
The pandemic accelerated those innovation efforts, and agencies still look to keep up with citizen expectations. However, needs continuously change, which Castle said presents a challenge for the government.
“One of the items I hear most frequently is the need to make the citizen or user experience of accessing digital services easier and more personalized,” Castle said.
Citizens were heavily engaged with the government during the height of the pandemic, but are accustomed to mobile apps, multichannel communications and the internet.
“When you think of government on-demand, it really is about accessing services from anywhere or any place at any time in a seamless and efficient way,” Castle said. “So, we’ve seen more clients invest in robotic process automation.”
Agencies are adopting and investing in more capabilities, such as chat bots, to drive resolution of less complicated citizen requests online instead of relying on fully staffed help desks.
In addition to investing in capabilities that enhance productivity, agencies are equally as focused on information security.
“Our clients are keeping data security at the forefront of digital transformation as more processes become digitized and the cloud becomes more of a solution,” Castle added.
This is critical as Xerox helps its clients meet those back-end needs with cloud services.
“Government is certainly looking to transition more to the cloud and benefit from scalable cloud-hosted, managed services, software-as-a-service model,” Castle said. Agencies are looking for Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program-authorized cloud services now more than ever since the pandemic, he added.
FedRAMP provides the “do once, use many times” framework that saves government time and money. According to Castle, Xerox was one of the first organizations within its market to offer a fully certified FedRAMP-managed print service solution.
“That’s really been very vital to many of our government customers,” he said.
Government clients also need to digitize paper-based information so it can be shared, stored and protected. Xerox helps its clients identify processes that can be streamlined and secured inside the organization, so government employees can focus on more proactive approaches to serving citizens.
“We help agencies adapt to these changing consumer needs through the digitization of information and solutions to manage that content. Solutions such as digital mail and backfile conversion have grown tremendously in the past year since the pandemic,” Castle said.
He’s also seen a rise in the importance of day-forward processing of digital paperwork. Castle said digital mailrooms didn’t exist prior to the pandemic, but customers needed solutions for the influx of mail to remote workers.
“There were so many different day-to-day business issues that were impacted by a sudden, fully remote workforce,” Castle said. As federal, state and local governments determined how to continue business in this remote environment, they relied on Xerox solutions to enable a remote workforce and provide services to their constituents.
Prepared for the Future of the Unexpected
Xerox was ready to help federal customers when the pandemic hit and is prepared to support government agencies deep into the future.
“We’ll continue to flourish as long as we continue to bring dynamic innovation and solutions that enhance government services and improve the way citizens engage with government organizations,” Castle said.
For instance, Xerox recently announced a partnership with the state of Victoria in Australia to launch a solution called Eloque, a structural health monitoring technology that helps manage and maintain critical infrastructure.
“When you think about the developed world’s critical transportation infrastructure such as bridges and overpasses, things of that nature are all approaching their end of designed life,” Castle explained. “There’s increasingly more of a need for inspection and maintenance around that infrastructure and really the current practice of manual inspection doesn’t scale to the size of the problem.”
This creates safety issues and expensive inspection and repairs. Eloque uses tiny fiber optic sensors attached to the bridge to accurately measure and estimate structural strain or thermal response, bending loads, vibration and corrosion.
“They’re all different measures of structural health,” Castle explained. “We use advanced analytics that are then used to evaluate the sensor data and we deliver that directly to the operator.”
The Victorian government is Xerox’s first client to accelerate Eloque and go to market, and the company has plans to rapidly expand the solution to the U.S. and other countries.
Xerox also came to market with a first-of-its-kind liquid metal 3D printer, the ElemX, and placed its first install at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
“When you think about 3D printing, this technology supports supply chains, in both government and commercial industries,” Castle said. “Supply chains continue to be some of the most disrupted business processes within organizations.”
Xerox developed a new robust 3D printing technology that helps organizations augment their supply chain. The capability to print metal parts on demand is a game changer for all supply chains moving forward, Castle said. Xerox has already started looking at how it can use the ElemX within its own supply chain to take advantage of the resiliency that additive manufacturing can provide, and clients can do the same the same for their organization.
In addition, Xerox recently launched its new augmented reality visual support platform, CareAR. It provides real-time, visual augmented-reality interactions as part of a seamless digital workflow, so clients can resolve service issues faster and lower their operational costs.
“These are just a few examples of the innovation that we brought to market and really differentiates Xerox from a market perspective,” Castle said, “certainly within our own vertical, but expanding well outside of it to other areas that are not traditional with our name.”