Partner Solution Brief
Dafolo—Citizen self-service
FPO About Dafolo In about 50 years, Dafolo has gone from being a printing house specializing in public administrative forms to a company bringing public administration into the age of e-government, with digital systems that strengthen the dialogue with citizens. Dafolo is the market leader in Denmark for forms solutions that enhance strategic business development. For more information, visit www.dafolo.dk.
Streamlining citizen services while achieving substantial cost savings E-government is about change by becoming more business-like, customerfocused, and efficient. It’s about being available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. User-centric, interactive content is the key to good e-government. This content must be timely, easy to find and use, and integrated into back-end processes so that requests can be dealt with completely online. Underscoring the European Union’s commitment to delivering online citizen services is an initiative called e-2012, a progressive plan that effectively mandates the online availability of application forms and government communications for citizens by 2012. Many governments, and local governments in particular, want to be part of this interconnected thinking and are under pressure from their citizens to provide many services online, such as applying for building permits, government subsidies, nursery and school places, and so on. In today’s digital world, citizens expect to communicate with their local government in the same way in which they shop online and use the Internet to connect with friends and colleagues. Dafolo, an enterprise solutions integrator and application service provider, has developed a fully modular solution that provides an intuitive, efficient self-service citizen portal based on government standards.
Challenge Local governments are typically struggling with paper-based processes. As a result, the response time to citizen requests is too long and much time is spent reentering data into various unconnected systems. In reviewing public services, Dafolo highlighted the following issues: • Too much time spent on quantity rather than quality. Data was checked and rechecked because there was no automated way of trusting that the data entered is correct, resulting in delayed response times and low citizen satisfaction. • Many people are not familiar or completely comfortable with online interactions. The user interface is of utmost importance when automating citizen services, and it needs to be very clear that completing the electronic forms is going to be easy. • The need to obtain signatures (either wet or digital) for many citizen interactions requires local governments to rethink their IT strategy.
Benefits of the Dafolo citizen self-service solution: • ROI achieved between six and eight months • Potential annual savings of 1,100 hours per implementation • Improved citizen service and response time • Data accuracy significantly increased • Flexible framework for automating additional services Products used: • Adobe® LiveCycle® Enterprise Suite (ES) – Adobe LiveCycle Forms ES – Adobe LiveCycle Process Management ES – Adobe LiveCycle Barcoded Forms ES – Adobe LiveCycle Reader® Extensions ES • Adobe Flex®
Governments need a flexible and scalable solution that engages their citizens and provides reliable access to online resources.
Solution To address these issues, Dafolo developed a framework of more than 250 dynamic PDF forms that help guide citizens through the process of applying for services. The PDF forms include built-in intelligence that ensures that citizens enter the right type of information in the fields, improving the accuracy of data and making it easier for government employees to process requests for quicker delivery of services. The solution, offered on an application service provider (ASP) basis, contains a number of key elements: • Citizens always have both an online option and offline option. With the offline option, the citizen can complete the form online and then print and sign it before sending it to their local government. The form contains an automatically generated 2D barcode so that it can be scanned on receipt, and the data flows through the process as though the entire application had been completed online. • Data is automatically extracted from the form fields and then imported into back-end databases for instant archiving and further administrative work. • Local governments can establish business rules to ensure that forms are properly routed and processed by authorized managers. Automated processes help ensure that protocols are consistently followed and applications are processed efficiently. This solution, initially developed for local use in Denmark, where it has been adopted by over 70% of local governments, is completely replicable and can be used by governments all over the world. Forms can be customized and adapted to comply with local regulations. The solution is particularly effective when a high level of standardization is introduced because reuse makes it more cost-effective.
Results The Dafolo citizen self-service solution provides citizens with easy and reliable access to services online as well as offline. It improves data accuracy by automating processing and storage of data extracted from intelligent PDF forms, drastically reducing the cost of citizen service. From Dafolo’s experience in Denmark, a number of key benefits stand out:
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• Return on investment (ROI) is typically achieved between six and eight months after deploying the solution. • Each local government has the potential to save more than 1,100 hours per year in manual processing costs. • Citizen service and response time are dramatically improved by reducing administrative tasks and allowing staff to focus on citizen-facing activities. Dafolo has developed an efficient, easy-to-use, and cost-effective system that transforms how citizens access services and how governments deliver them.
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