Utah is known for its rugged natural beauty, treasured by residents and attracting millions of tourists every year. The state government takes pride in protecting these lands and preserving a great quality of life for its residents.
In 2019, Spencer J. Cox, Lieutenant Governor of Utah, introduced eSign as part of the New Workplace Teleworking Initiative, which utilizes Adobe Acrobat Sign. Telework was primarily designed as a government efficiency program. Enabling more employees to work remotely would decrease carbon emissions, save on building space, and distribute jobs across the state.
State of Utah officials couldn’t have possibly foreseen how urgent this telework capability would become. While the State had contingency plans in place for natural disasters, no one could have predicted for Utah to be simultaneously struck by a 5.7 earthquake and the growing threat of the COVID-19 pandemic.
State of Utah employees were ready, willing, and able
With dual disasters, multiple areas of Utah residents’ lives were impacted – home, business, health, and finance. Fortunately, the dedicated employees working for the State of Utah had digital solutions in place, enabling them to continue vital services, even while impacted and sheltering-in-place themselves. Almost immediately, residents were able to access these much-needed government services.
The response was so positive among the first teams who used Adobe solutions for teleworking, the State of Utah created an eSign video to spread the word and inspire more teams across the state to adopt Adobe Acrobat Sign. With a goal of launching a swift and strong emergency response effort, the video talks about the value of going 100% paperless and how easy it is to handle high volumes of contracts and other approval processes in a teleworking environment.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/PQl_y3TnXo0
Facilitating emergency response efforts
By design, most government planning processes and services require input and sign-offs from multiple parties, including Incident Action Plans for emergency response. During normal circumstances, government teams huddle around a conference room table or walk down the hallway to circulate documents for revision and approval.
Normally, it takes two to three days to circulate and approve an emergency procurement plan. Using Adobe Acrobat Sign, they accomplished the same result in minutes. Even when in-office operations resume, employees expect the paperless process to continue.
Streamlining cross-departmental communication
As the agencies within the State of Utah started seeing a large volume of new requests for services, many of them embraced a new way of electronically processing paperwork. They quickly expanded their use of Adobe Acrobat DC and Adobe Acrobat Sign to circulate and approve hundreds of procurement agreements, operational plans, grants, budgets and other contracts. This flexible framework made it easier to customize and coordinate facilitation between finance, operations, logistics, and planning through to final sign-off of each plan.