Electronic Forms - Facts And Information
By Maggie Biggs, FCW.com
Ever since the E-Government Act of 2002, electronic forms have become all the rage at agencies. And what's not to like? When properly implemented, e-forms, or electronic forms, promise to cut time and costs from agency business processes.
When agency back-office staffers key in data from paper forms, the amount of time required and the potential for error are great. By contrast, e-forms allow the general public, agency staffers, contractors and agencies to accurately complete forms with text fields that can automatically be filled in from available data to achieve increased efficiency.
Moreover, you can integrate e-forms processing into agency workflows, which speeds transactions. You can also store e-forms in agency document repositories and integrate them with other document management, Web and portal-based technologies. Tight audit and security features and form capabilities that meet compliance requirements also make e-forms attractive.
But e-forms are not perfect. The challenge for e-form providers is to decide whether to provide a complete e-forms platform - graphical user interface, design tools, management and workflow tools, and full support for form distribution and storage - or to provide solid user interfaces and robust design tools that integrate with existing agency infrastructure components such as Web portals.
Agency IT buyers examining the e-forms landscape will need to analyze available solutions vs. their existing infrastructure. In addition, buyers will need to carefully consider whether to purchase a solution that supports proprietary formats or open standards.
Also during e-forms proof-of-concept projects, question the amount of programming you need to make forms "intelligent" enough to yield the expected return on investment. If you are going to integrate e-forms with relational databases, Extensible Markup Language repositories, Web services, portals or document management systems, you don't want the programming effort to become a bottleneck.
You must also consider cost, security, compliance and training.