Page 42 - FCW, September/October 2020

42
September/October 2020 FCW.COM
Ideas
Let’s finally put
government forms
to work
Reimagining form-based data collection as a shared service could transform many agencies’ operations
BY MICHAEL GARLAND
The U.S. government is awash in more official forms than any organization in the history of civilization. A review of the websites where the Defense Department and the General Services Administration keep libraries of official forms suggests there are well over 10,000 forms poised for download.
Given that staggering volume, one might imagine that the government is extremely forward thinking about forms and their management. Unfortunately, it’s not. In fact, the laws, regulations and policies controlling forms usage show the government is well behind the times and continues to drive policy from a distant past.
The government’s approach to forms is overdue for a complete makeover — a modernization effort that would provide instant cost avoid- ance and significant economies of scale, potentially worth billions of dollars. To be clear, this is not about expanding the adoption of the status quo digital document. There is a new generation of proven technology that provides enormous cost savings by bringing forms to life and transform- ing them from dead electronic arti- facts into living, dynamic bot-like enti-
ties that drive data collection and data management. This is about exploiting the potential processing power of the form itself.
A quick history of forms
For the most part, the government handles forms management as though it’s still 1995, the year of the Paperwork Reduction Act. That law’s focus was to limit the creation of new forms, with an emphasis on reducing duplication and minimizing burdens on citizens. It was written when fax machines were ubiquitous and before data management disciplines were paramount.
Therefore, the Paperwork Reduc- tion Act — a relic of the Clinton-era “reinventing government” push — does not contemplate current forms technology and provides no guidance on best practices for modern data col- lection. As its name suggests, the law is focused on paper.
Twenty-five years later, no policy- making entity in the government has seriously reconsidered the way in which forms data is collected, man- aged and exploited to maximize effi- ciency. To be fair, some legislation has nibbled around the edges. The 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience
Act of 2018 is designed to ensure that all paper forms are digitized on gov- ernment websites and accessible by those with disabilities. But simply getting old paper forms into a digi- tized format is yesterday’s initiative. It only addresses the most rudimentary of useful goals, and ironically, it may actually perpetuate a chronic issue: dead data marooned on a form.
Here’s the problem: The govern- ment predominantly uses electronic forms in one of two ways. The first is to simply digitize a paper form into a PDF and make it available for comple- tion via the web. Sure, the form can be emailed and stored, but the data is still locked up on the form. To use the stranded data, somebody must either export it or retype the infor- mation into another system.
Those forms are only marginally better than microfiche. Instead of the data uselessly inert in a filing cabinet, the image of the data is now uselessly inert on a server.
The second and more progressive way the government uses electronic forms is by hardcoding them into a dedicated web application. That is an improvement but still inadequate because any change or evolution in the form requires software developers