Getting started with document automation in the public sector
Image credit: Adobe Stock/ Mdisk.
Governments are under pressure to operate more efficiently and effectively, delivering services that benefit their constituents, while operating in a manner that motivates government employees to achieve their best. Unfortunately, government agencies at all levels still rely too heavily on manual and paper-based processes that cause a burden to the public and create frustrations with internal government employees.
Inundated with paper
According to a 2022 report by the U.S. Chamber of Congress, while citizens’ satisfaction with digital services has improved as government has embraced more digital solutions, 4 in 10 citizens are still not satisfied. The sheer number of forms the federal government processes alone each year (106 billion forms processed in 2022 according to the same report) means that vast quantities of documents are produced manually or as paper.
Automating digital document workflows can go a long way towards improving citizen and employee satisfaction, and the process does not need to be overly complex to deliver value.
Introducing Adobe Acrobat Services
Adobe Acrobat Services is a suite of application programming interfaces (APIs) that are part of Adobe Document Cloud and are designed to help organizations build new and innovative document solutions and integrate with existing technology infrastructures. Every phase of the document lifecycle — from document creation to publication — can be supported with automation capabilities leveraging Acrobat Services.
Acrobat Services document lifecycle.
Additionally, powerful low code, point-and-click Adobe PDF and Adobe Acrobat Sign connectors integrated with Microsoft Power Automate enable developers and non-developers alike to automate processes using robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities across the document lifecycle.
Example of Microsoft Power Automate and Adobe Acrobat Services workflow.
Use cases — like preparing contracts and grants, publishing PDF content to websites, running optical character recognition (OCR) on PDFs, protecting documents with encryption, applying accessibility tags for 508 compliance, electronically signing documents, and extracting unstructured content from documents for downstream processing in systems of record — are all possible at scale with Acrobat Services. Sample use cases can be found here.
This is a profoundly impactful area of innovation at Adobe — a capability that can be leveraged by government agencies and the partners and systems integrators that support the government’s diverse mission.
Get started today with Adobe Acrobat Services
Acrobat Services allows organizations to automate and customize end-to-end document workflows with APIs. Gartner anticipates that by 2023, 75% of governments will have at least three automation initiatives launched or underway. Acrobat Services can serve as a powerful tool for government agencies, and the partners that support the mission of government, to automate time-consuming and mundane document tasks and significantly improve the employee and constituent experience.
The federal RPA Program Playbook, developed by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), defines RPA as a low to no-code Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) technology that can be used to automate repetitive, rules-based tasks. The playbook mentions that RPA is not just a workload reduction technology. It can be deployed to increase quality, reduce human error, increase compliance, strengthen controls environments, and to add new services to an organization's portfolio. Given the preponderance of manual and paper-based processes in government that could be streamlined with this technology (see the Federal RPA Use Case Inventory), Acrobat Services, especially when coupled with applications like Microsoft Power Automate or UiPath, is well positioned to serve as a foundational component of an agency’s enterprise architecture.
As with any technology, good planning and governance are important to ensure success, but as the RPA Program Playbook states, agencies should be biased toward action and just get started. Agencies at all levels of government can get started by identifying a use case to pilot that is manual and paper-based and would provide significant business value through automation. Based on the results of the pilot, agencies can expand their automation scope as appropriate. The Digital Services Playbook provides an excellent framework and guiding principles for digital transformation.
For more information on how Adobe solutions can help with automation and digital document workflows, see the Adobe Document Cloud and Acrobat Services Overview.