Adobe commissioned Forrester Consulting to research what challenges Australian government agencies face, what they can do to accelerate successful digital transformations, and the importance of digital document processes. To explore this topic, Forrester conducted an online survey with 150 senior business and technology decision-makers responsible for digital document processing at government agencies in Australia, Singapore, and India.

Forrester’s study yielded the following key findings:

• Australian government agencies underutilize digital document process solutions, which impedes citizen and employee experiences. Agencies are ill-equipped to address digital-document-enabled delivery. Sixty-eight percent of respondents said a lack of technology and tools is impacting employee productivity, and 58% said their agency has difficulty maintaining security and confidentiality and ensuring that only the right people can access specific documents.

• Digitising document processes is an essential building block to secured digital government services. Sixty-two percent of respondents said ensuring data security and compliance is an essential benefit of digitizing document workflows. Sixty-six percent of respondents said reducing fraud risks with better audit trails is a significant benefit.

• Using a phased deployment delivers immediate benefits. Digital document process solutions can be deployed in isolation or with application-based integrations ahead of full process digitization. In the meantime, agencies can plan how to optimize these solutions and deploy them more widely as they modernize their legacy technologies and digitize cloud-enabled processes at scale.

The disruptions brought by the pandemic forced Australian government agencies to accelerate their digital initiatives, including how they create, distribute, sign, and store documents. While they rely more heavily on paper-based processes than other verticals, government agencies have undergone a mindset shift in the last 18 months when it comes to document digitization.

• Australian government agencies currently use a mix of paper and digital document processes. Only 14% of respondents said their agency has fully digitized its document processes as most continue to use a mix of paper-based and digital document workflows. For instance, respondents said 32% of law enforcement, corrections, and court forms are not yet digitized. Twenty percent of respondents said legal departments rely the most on paper-based document processes, and 26% said procurement departments do.

• The rise of digital government services brought a mindset shift within agencies. The pandemic’s disruptions pushed Australian government agencies to further digitize their document processes. As a result, barriers to adopting digital document process technologies (e.g., e-signatures) are fading away. Fifty-six percent of respondents said they were concerned about the complexity of integrating e-signatures with day-to-day productivity applications prior to the pandemic, but this is down to 18% today.

Download the full report HERE