Digital workers for the public sector with PICTURE and MR.KNOW: upload a job description and get an initial AI-based assessment of your automation potential.
In 5 steps to your digital colleague.
Upload a job ad or paste a URL.
AI checks tasks, workflows and automation potential – including a BPMN preview.
Digital worker as Assistant, Agent or Worker.
Seamless integration into ERP, CRM, HR – cloud or on-premise.
Monitoring, governance and ongoing optimisation.
Each can be introduced on its own – and step by step they grow into a digital team. Every one of them starts from a process model that PICTURE has already documented.
Cities and municipalities, districts and county administrations, federal states and federal agencies, universities and research institutions, churches and social institutions, chambers and associations: more than 1,200 public-sector organisations already document their processes with PICTURE. Automation is the next step – and it starts exactly where routine work ties up experienced staff.
In many administrations a substantial share of the workforce will retire within the next few years, and posts in casework and organisation stay vacant for a long time. When people leave, procedural knowledge leaves with them.
Digital workers take over the recurring parts of a job profile – around the clock and without quality fluctuations. At the same time the documented process model captures the knowledge that would otherwise disappear with individuals.
Online portals are an important building block of process digitalisation – but they stop at the front office. Behind it, the submitted application often falls back into manual handling: printouts, emails and word of mouth.
Digital workers close exactly that gap: they automate the back office while integrating the specialist applications that are already in place there.
Every switch between digital and paper costs time through manual entry, raises the error rate, drives up operating costs and makes it harder to trace a case end to end.
Citizens feel the result – as delay, and as a follow-up question that need never have arisen. Media-break-free processes are therefore not an end in themselves but the basis for reliable processing times.
"Automated nonsense stays nonsense." A process register first shows which processes exist at all, who is responsible for what, and which ones are worth the effort: in a typical evaluation, 541 recorded processes come down to 223 structured ones, of which 70 have a case volume above 1,000 per year and 15 have citizens as the recipient of the service.
Those 15 are the starting point – not the 541. That produces a defensible sequence instead of a lighthouse project.
Internal audit, supervisory authorities, data protection officers and staff councils all require evidence. Processes are documented and versioned, prompts are kept in a vault, and the AI models are interchangeable – there is no vendor lock-in.
Operation is GDPR-compliant and multi-tenant, either as a highly secure SaaS cloud or on-premise in your own or a municipal data centre. Multi-tenancy also makes it possible to share one solution across several authorities.
BPMN 2.0 orchestration sits above the existing systems and integrates specialist applications, electronic records, finance and HR systems via open standards, interfaces and connectors instead of replacing them.
The focus is deliberately on the processes that no specialist application covers yet. Most of the effort goes once into the reusable foundation – every additional digital worker is then largely a matter of configuration.
PICTURE GmbH, based in Münster, Germany, has been the nationwide specialist for organisational design and process management in the public sector since 2008 – mid-sized, independent and owner-managed. More than 1,200 customers, over 350 projects and a team of more than 55 people stand behind the motto "Process management. Just do it."
The PICTURE process platform is one of the most widely used solutions for process documentation, analysis and optimisation in public administration. The matching PICTURE method describes workflows using 24 domain building blocks developed specifically for the public sector – which markedly improves acceptance, speed and result quality compared with general-purpose modelling notations. PICTURE-BPMN, BPMN 2.0, PICTURE-Classic and FIM are supported as well.
Together with MR.KNOW this becomes an end-to-end path: PICTURE identifies, prioritises, documents and optimises the processes, MR.KNOW takes the models over without loss and turns them into a running application. From process documentation to no-code automation without media breaks – and without modelling any process a second time.
The essentials about digital workers and the potential analysis.
A digital worker is neither a chatbot nor a single script, but a modelled process: it recognises a situation, decides based on rules, executes, produces documents and escalates to a human when needed. MR.KNOW distinguishes three levels — Digital Assistant (rule-based on BPMN 2.0), Digital Agent (AI-powered, also understands unstructured data) and Digital Worker (autonomous AI orchestration across system boundaries).
You upload a job description or job ad as a PDF, provide a link to an existing job ad, or enter the text directly. Tasks, workflows and the achievable degree of automation are analysed; you receive the assessment by email, usually within a few minutes. The analysis is free and without obligation.
A phased approach has proven itself: a compact discovery workshop, from which a working pilot for one concrete use case emerges, followed by the rollout to further locations or tenants. The first productive use case takes weeks rather than months because it builds on an existing platform.
The benefit is twofold: manual effort goes down, and error rates and lead times fall with it. Reuse is what decides profitability — most of the effort goes once into the foundation of data integration, extraction and the rule and document engines. Every further digital worker is largely a matter of configuration and therefore costs a fraction of the first one.
Processes are documented and versioned, prompts are managed in a vault, and the AI models are interchangeable — there is no vendor lock-in. Operation is GDPR-compliant and multi-tenant, either as a highly secure SaaS cloud or on-premise in your own data centre. Decisions therefore remain auditable, which becomes an advantage in regulated environments.
No. BPMN 2.0 orchestration sits above the existing systems and integrates specialist applications, electronic records, ERP, CRM or HR systems via open standards, APIs and connectors instead of competing with them. The focus is on the processes that no specialist application supports yet. This protects existing investments — regardless of how individual vendors develop.
No. Digital workers take over the recurring routine parts that tie up experienced employees — around the clock and without quality fluctuations. They close skills-shortage gaps rather than cutting jobs.
Yes. Because the platform is multi-tenant, a digital worker built once can be used several times across authorities — for example through a special-purpose association, a municipal IT service provider, a district acting for its municipalities or an umbrella association acting for its members. The effort is shared across several shoulders, and even a small administration starts from a proven process rather than from scratch.
PICTURE contributes the public-administration expertise and the process documentation: with the PICTURE process platform and the PICTURE method of 24 domain building blocks, processes are identified, prioritised, documented and organisationally optimised — including content attributes, the identification of automation characteristics and a defensible prioritisation order. MR.KNOW takes these models over without loss: BPMN 2.0 is fully supported, maintained attributes are carried across, and no process has to be modelled a second time. True to PICTURE's motto "automated nonsense stays nonsense", organisational optimisation always comes before technology.
