Contributor: Rodrick Smith, Information Technology Analyst for the City of Albany, Georgia.
Despite its humble size of 70K residents, Albany, GA is at the cutting-edge of government tech. At the forefront of this effort: IT (Information Technology) analyst Rodrick Smith. For the last 7 years, he has championed projects to reduce tedious manual processes.
Albany began their journey to go “paperless” by implementing a content services platform, Laserfiche, in 2017. These efforts accelerated as the pandemic began to take hold in 2020. The city discovered an immediate need for a secure, contactless digital signature solution for government. They initially adopted DocuSign, but found it wasn’t user-friendly or feature-rich enough for their needs – so they quickly pivoted with the support of MCCi’s experts.
The Solution
The team reached out to their trusted MCCi consultant, Mike Beaudreau, and the answer became clear: OneSpan Sign. The robust security features and Laserfiche integration knocked out their challenges in no time. In the 10 months since adoption, over 2000 transactions have been processed.
“It’s a straightforward platform, especially from the user side,” Rodrick said. “There wasn’t much of a learning curve.”
OneSpan Across the City
The city’s earliest adopters were the municipal and county judicial teams. They use OneSpan Sign for digital signatures for government documents like subpoenas and probate records.
Their procurement team quickly followed suit.
“The vendor application is done from the website in Laserfiche Forms, then it gets approved or reviewed by our procurement team. [OneSpan] automatically sends out the document for signature. Once it’s signed, it comes back and it’s all created in a nice, neat folder. And our admin team – they just make sure it’s there!”
Rodrick and his team are already working with their next department on adoption: HR (Human Resources). All onboarding documentation and signatures will be digitized through Laserfiche and OneSpan. New employees can complete onboarding quickly – saving the HR team a meeting just to complete paperwork.
Benefits
The pandemic may have forced Albany into adoption, but both government officials and citizens continue to experience the benefits of digital signatures:
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Convenience – Users can sign remotely, rather than shuffling file folders from desk to desk around the city.
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Compliance – OneSpan signatures are encrypted and provide a detailed audit trail that helps to verify the identity of the signer.
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Exposing other digitization opportunities – Rodrick continues to push for less and less paper across the city. “You can sort of see OneSpan as an on-ramp to a highway,” he said. “It’s helping a lot of our departments see [the possibility for] electronic document capturing and automatic processing.”
For a step-by-step guide on collecting and managing digital signatures with the Laserfiche and Onespan integration, check out our blog “How to Collect Digital Signatures in Laserfiche.”
