If you enjoy filling out forms, Adobe’s Cloud Solutions for Government may not be for you.
What may be a task as mundane, ubiquitous and seemingly essential as printing may actually be an outdated practice – one that is costing citizens extra money and wait times, according to Adobe.
“You could save 10-30 per cent of peoples’ time,” said Brian Paget, technical director for content and analytics at Adobe. “If you think of the optimizations that can be done in the form filling process … you can roll down the number of calls that the government gets from in the call centre.”
In a way, he says, Adobe is setting out to undo what it had accomplished in the first place – translating traditional paper forms into PDFs.
Nevertheless, Paget said that this is the area with the most potential for improved user experience in dealing with the government. In place of a piece of electronic paper, a user would have a guided experience that is adaptive to not only the user’s device, but also their answers.
Yet this is not the only area that Adobe is hoping to change. It’s one of several areas that the company wants to flip on its head with its release of Adobe’s government cloud solutions, which includes the Adobe Experience Manager, aimed at content creation and cross-platform publishing.
This, along with Adobe Analytics, Connect, a web-conferencing platform, EchoSign, a digital signature solution, now join Acrobat and Creative Cloud as a SaaS offering.
While the solutions have been available on-premise, the goal now is to facilitate adoption and reduce the cost, while ensuring that for once the government actually stays ahead of the game.
“What we’re doing is taking the best of what we can offer from a commercial capabilities perspective and … really increase the security for government agencies as well as focus on accessibility,” said Paget. He added that in addition to compliance, Adobe has built in security functions to allow for auditing and document tracking and more.
So far, Canadian agencies that have implemented the Adobe’s Cloud Solutions for Government include Citizenship and Immigration, Veterans Affairs Canada, and Employment and Social Development Canada.
“Just optimizing those simple form-based experiences, which we have tens of thousands of in the government, you can save tons of money and time for the citizens, but also the people in the government,” said Paget.