ebook: The Value of Usable Data for Government Agencies

Transcription

1 ebook: The Value of Usable Data for Government Agencies

2 Let s face it. Paper forms and the processing of data collected by paper remain the primary channel for election finance and government transparency regulators. Moreover, state and county regulators increasingly recognize the need to make filing information public as usable data. In today s budgetconscious environment, public officials constantly need to do more with less, while always looking ahead to a digital future that ultimately meets their mission. Uprooting engrained paper processes might seem like a daunting task to many and using legacy solutions may very well prove to be just that. However, when the right tools and processes are in place, the transition can be nearly effortless. Instead of trying to sell you on unrealistic promises, we d like to instead walk you through Captricity s track record that proves it s possible. Benefits: Why Go Paperless? There are many benefits to going paperless, but when it comes to government, these three climb to the top:

3 1 2 3 Faster Review, Faster Turnaround for Public Consumption. The process of manually handling paper forms and files is time consuming and fragmented. Going paperless speeds up data processing time and enables your agency to make public information available to the public in a fraction of the time. Usable Data is the New Standard for Government Transparency. Minimizing paper processes doesn t just improve internal operations it makes a big impact on constituent-facing activities. Access to open, machine-readable data enables journalists and civic organizations to dive into the information that is relevant to their needs quickly and without hassle. Thought-leaders like The McKinsey Center for Government have begun to quantify the economic impact of open data; but they have not yet tried to quantify the value of a more responsive and approachable political system. Lower Costs for Manual Review and Data Entry. When paper processes are digitized, employees spend less time manually entering data or filing forms, and shift more of their attention to enforcing regulations and working with constituents. Captricity can help public servants improve workflows and meet budget constraints while narrowing the focus on the agency mission.

4 Best Practices: How to Make the Transition The process of transitioning to a digital workflow isn t difficult; there are many vendors who provide simple web and mobile form capabilities. The challenge is to do it in a way that all customer data (whether collected by paper, , fax or web form) lives in a single cloud database accessible by legacy backend systems that help drive your business intelligence and customer relation management processes. This unified data source also ensures critical information is accessible at all times and classified properly to keep individual customer cases up-to-date and accurate. Captricity helps government agencies transition from paper to digital at the pace that s right for them and in a way that effectively captures all customer information without disrupting existing business workflows.

5 Consider the Situation in Georgia in December 2013 A believer in the benefits of a paperless system, the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission invested significant capital to build an e-filing system for financial disclosures. Importantly, all the information submitted across the state would come to reside in a single, searchable, machinereadable database open to the public. However, when the state legislature passed a bill to require e-filing across the state, local filers protested the new burden. The legislature relented and paper filings (hand-filled) could be submitted to local filing agencies and passed on (as a fax) to the Commission. A forward-thinking and costly initiative was nearly brought to a halt by an entrenched paper process. Read Georgia s Success Story

6 Captricity was able to step in and bridge the paper-to-digital divide for Georgia. As you continue to explore go-digital options (before investing millions of dollars), these simple best practices are important to keep in mind: Choose a Cloud-Based Solution to Improve Time-to-Value. Cloud-based solutions allow for rapid iteration and improvement, and should be considered a requirement in every go-digital strategy. With bulky on-premise solutions, companies can wait up to a year (or more) for the first usable solution to be deployed. With a cloud-native solution, you can try the service immediately without IT resources to help determine if it is Establish a Plan. Ask questions to identify potential problem areas before they arise: What tools will be used to scan paper filings? What standard naming convention will be used? How will old paper files be handled? Will old paper files be converted or just those created after the new system is put in place? Document the answers to these questions and use them to create internal guidelines and procedures. Build Internal Champions. The most successful processes keep the people who run them front and center. Building a team of internal champions increases visibility and company-wide adoption, and helps management collect valuable feedback to improve design and provide greater community adoption once live. Don t Fix What isn t Broken. Going digital doesn t mean operations and processes have to change. The same workflow that was put in place for managing paper can still be used for managing digital data it just makes it more efficient. the right solution for you. Once selected, a cloud solution like Captricity can be deployed across your business in days or weeks, not months.

7 Why Captricity? Captricity is the only customer data management solution that leverages crowd-guided machine learning to capture and unify the critical public filing information that often bogs down regulatory review or may remain static and unusable to the public. Our technology accurately recognizes handwriting so paper disclosures and registration forms can flow seamlessly into existing legacy, digital CRM or disclosure systems. Our cloud-based constituent data management platform captures data from all input channels including paper, web and mobile in one place at two times the rate of human accuracy and at 50 times the speed. Get in Touch View Additional Resources Source: