Maintaining contract and other paperwork that require signatures to move forward can be especially difficult in public sector organizations. Procurement rules, audit trails, and shuffling paperwork around is a time consuming and fairly retro process in today’s technology environment. However, in Nevada, the Department of Transportation has shown that modernization can be a surprisingly quick and low cost process.
Nevada DOT recently moved to the DocuSign solution for tracking signatures on important paperwork, taking a 20 seat pilot to over 200 users in under a year – a timeline that should make any public sector enterprise take notice. “You’re probably wondering how I did that,” Teresa Schlaffer NVDOT Business Process Analyst, joked in an interview with CivSource. DocuSign allows users to sign contracts or maintain a record of who has looked at particular documents over time. “With DocuSign we were able to really significantly cut down the cost and time spent managing paperwork by bringing that process online. That made adoption of the service easier within the organization.” Schlaffer said.
DocuSign implementation takes a few weeks at the outside, and most of that is in change management – helping people learn how to use the tool, explains Sharon Hayes, DocuSign’s Director of Government Client Services. “Typically the cost for an initial pilot project is well within most offices discretionary allowances so we can get something started without running into procurement hurdles.”
NVDOT uses the service for managing vendor contracts, in-house paperwork and reviewing documents like engineering blueprints.
Schlaffer added that using DocuSign is a fairly intuitive process for users to grasp, and the audit trail allows for document tracking if there is a question or a mistake. That made expanding the pilot easy to do, and also gave people more flexibility in terms of how and where they handle documents management. “This is something that has worked across business areas for us because you can get all the eyes you need on a document quickly. Mobile access also allows us to keep the process going even if we are away from the office.”
