Page 45 - GCN, June/july 2017

tion cards and Common Access Cards. To comply with federal requirements for identity management and access control, which include two-factor au- thentication and homeland security presidential directives, field employees carry laptops that have derived creden-
tial chip technology.
“Once the PIN is confirmed, eSign-
Live generates a hash of the informa- tion at the time of signing (name, date, time, IP address, certificate used to sign the document), along with a unique hash of the document itself,” said Tom- my Petrogiannis, president of eSignLive by VASCO Data Security International. “The result is a secure, tamper-sealed e-signed PDF with a detailed audit trail embedded directly into the document.”
Additionally, eSignLive has a direct connection to SharePoint, a web-based workflow tool that integrates with Mi- crosoft Office. As a result, eSignLive automatically inherits and interfaces with any rules or workflows created in SharePoint and can handle multiple documents with unlimited page counts and sizes.
The Census Bureau’s performance review process, which is mandated by the Office of Personnel Management, involves three written reviews through- out the year, each of which requires two to three signatures. The bureau has more than 8,000 field employees nationwide, and the manual signing process was costing $5 per signature per cycle and taking as long as three months per employee.
When eSignLive is fully implemented in October, the entire process will be automated, enabling workers to sign performance reviews electronically on any device. The tool will save the bu- reau $1.2 million annually in shipping costs and cut turnaround time by 70 percent.
Field employees will get access to the system this spring, while the 7,000 headquarters and regional workers will begin using it later this year.
STREAMLINING IN SACRAMENTO
After Sacramento officials partially digi- tized the city’s solicitation and contract management, they were duplicating work to accommodate the mix of elec- tronic and paper processes.
The city could issue a digital solicita- tion, for example, “but then we would receive the bids in a written form be- cause they needed to have a signature on them,” said Dawn Bullwinkel, as- sistant city clerk and compliance offi- cer. Employees would scan the paper documents and add them to the city repository, but when the contract was awarded, “we would have to get their wet signature on that document, and
“Our end users love, love, love, love the ease of signing these documents. It’s definitely going to change our organization for the better.”
— DAWN BULLWINKEL, SACRAMENTO, CALIF.
then the city would sign it, and then we would image that again into our reposi- tory. It was very cumbersome and not very efficient.”
Digital signatures were the missing link, and Sacramento officials turned to eSignLive for help. They applied the solution to the Fair Political Practices Commission’s documentation in Octo- ber 2016 and to legislative documents in January. When Sacramento’s new solicitation and contract management system goes live in September, digital signatures will be part of it, too.
The approach increases efficiency and saves money, and users appreci-
ate being able to access and sign docu- ments no matter where they are, as long as they have access to the cloud, Bullwinkel said.
“Our end users love, love, love, love the ease of signing these documents,” she said. “It’s definitely going to change our organization for the better.”
But eSignLive is about more than just signatures, Petrogiannis said. It’s also about the workflow.
“We call it process orchestration: Who sees what when, in what order, what data do people have to fill in?” he said. “That whole process is not only controlled but manageable in the sense that you can inspect it in real time. Paper, once it leaves your desk and it lands on someone else’s desk, is a black hole; you don’t know where it is. But if you’re digitizing these processes us- ing eSignLive, either the administrator or the person starting the process has total visibility into where things are in the workflow.”
In the background, the system re- cords who has looked at the pages and for how long, the actions they took and the processes they used — a big help in proving compliance with federal, state or local laws.
Additionally, eSignLive virtually eliminates the need for quality assur- ance at the end of the signing process because it automatically ensures that all the documents’ fields are filled in.
“That’s probably one of the biggest things people don’t get from the term ‘electronic signature,’” Petrogiannis said. “It really is about that digital transaction and making sure that it’s been done properly and follows all the guidelines.”
At the Census Bureau and in Sacra- mento, expansion plans are underway even as rollouts continue. Census of- ficials plan to make e-signatures an enterprisewide service, and Bullwinkel said Sacramento’s Community Devel- opment Department wants to use digi- tal signatures on permit applications.•
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