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It's Past Time to Get the Fax Outa Here!
Two GovTech Today articles echo what we've said for years
Two different articles from GovTech Today caught my eye, and that's tough to do since I get a couple hundred emails a day!
In the first article, Daniel Castro tells us that government offices still use forms - their bread and butter - for all their processing. And some still force their residents to turn in the form in person, by mail, or BY FAX! Who has a fax machine these days? Very few, as Dan relays, and not only is it costing government offices money, it's holding back the digital services requested and required by a modern society.
In an unrelated story, Joe Morris reports on a Deloitte survey that prooves that "If a government offers easy to use, secure digital services, residents tend to have a higher trust score of their government."
CIOs: set a goal for creating better digital service - at least removing faxes - soon. Here's how to join the 2020's...
Instead of requiring a resident to fill out a paper form and somehow get it to you, have them fill out an online form. Firstly, all but a few residents have computers and/or smart phones, so that's no longer an excuse. (Especially when you already instruct them to obtain the form from your website!)
Second: when the resident fills out the form digitally, there are fewer mistakes as well as a time savings. In the old way, a clerk has to interpret some pretty poor penmanship and retype the name and/or address and/or a dozen other possible pieces of information on a form. That takes time, which the clerk has little of, and introduces errors.
Third, processing is faster, rejections and resubmissions are reduced, and, the big one...
Your residents trust you more!
There's more advantages than this, after you realize that the information collected with the form is now in a database where it can be used again and again.
Sprocket has been building business systems for years, and just recently, joined an elite group of no-code/low-code engineers using a new toolset that makes configuring new applications faster and easier than ever before. We've built several systems using this tool and the government offices are quite happy with the results.
We understand that old systems die hard, and you need paper forms for some interim. We can even generate a paper form from the data in the database.
There are many functions that a state or local government agency can digitize:
- vital record requests
- marriage license applications
- property tax lookups, payments
- service initialization or cancellation
- voter lookup, registration, etc
And don't forget the businesses who haven't moved their sales or support processes into this decade. We can do the same for you.
Contact us (yes, using our online form!) and let's start the conversation.
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Don Gingold
Co-Founder and Managing Director of Sprocket Websites, Inc.; Co-Founder Chicago Area DotNetNuke User Group
Other posts by Don Gingold