How to Make Your Case for a New Government Workflow Solution

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, outdated and manual processes cost government agencies an estimated $38.7 billion every year. The time and money that could be spent creating value is wasted on paperwork that not only frustrates both citizens and government employees, but also creates unnecessary risk.

As a result, the government has prioritized reimagining constituent experiences and building  resilient infrastructures.

How can the government achieve these priorities? By introducing technology solutions, government agencies can leave paper behind and digitally transform critical workflows to deliver on their mission and introduce seamless experiences.

However, it can be challenging to make the case that a key investment is needed to help employees and better serve constituents. The following step-by-step guide will help make your business case for upgrading to a new workflow solution for government.

Step 1 – Identify your priorities: Since not all problems are created equal, the first step is to identify the greatest workflow challenges and overall priorities. For example, consider enhancing the systems that cause the most approval delays, customer complaints and forms to complete.

Step 2 – Create a plan: Now that the most challenging workflows have been identified, the next step is to examine why these issues exist in the first place, then develop a go-forward plan.

This involves bringing in all relevant stakeholders—from senior leaders to program managers, as well as leaders across all departments that the process impacts, such as legal, IT, HR and procurement.

The plan should encompass the overall vision, goals, objectives, scope of work, success criteria, requirements, budget, risk assessment and implementation schedule. These elements can be uncovered by asking these questions:

1. What could the agency achieve if the investment is made?
2. Who would benefit most from the solution?
3. How much money is required and what are the risks?
4. How does this proposed workflow integrate into the existing technology stack?

Step 3 – Explain the tangible benefits: Streamlined workflows offer many tangible benefits, which is why it’s important to highlight the expected outcomes when makingyour business case. Here are the core areas for ROI:

• Faster turnaround time: Give citizens and staff the speed and convenience of doing business digitally.
• Hard cost-savings: Save money by eliminating paper and inefficient time-consuming workflows.
• Greater employee productivity: Eliminate manual and redundant tasks so
• employees can focus more on strategic work.
• Fewer errors: Decrease the number of process errors due to incorrect or missing information.
• Shortened implementation time: Seamlessly integrate with pre-built integrations to achieve faster value.

You don’t need to plan and make your business case alone. DocuSign works with agencies to identify workflow problem areas, develop tailored solutions and help secure approvals.

Click here to download our full checklist for how to make the case for a new government workflow solution.