How Can Government Agencies Improve Collaboration?

Hello, I’m George Gao, chief executive officer at Foxit Software and, in this blog post, I’m going to look at ways for state and local governments to enhance collaboration.

In my opinion, no one faces a tougher challenge when it comes to improving internal and external communication. That’s because government agencies must balance a move to transparency and citizen engagement, while making sure that they are still guarding against the spending waste, data leaks and inefficiency that has plagued the industry.

New Approaches Are Required

Government agencies need a new approach to document management and collaboration in today’s connected world. What is the one tool that might be a government worker’s biggest ally in this new reality? The answer might surprise you, although it doesn’t surprise us. It’s the Portable Document Format (PDF).

Although PDF is a familiar tool for government agencies, recent innovations to the software are streamlining processes and improving communications. Most importantly this recent PDF innovation is leading to the software becoming a key collaboration tool.

With these new capabilities, government employees can leverage PDFs across all areas of civil service, including the public library, police department, public works, city hall, city home campus, and court systems to improve collaboration.

Within state and local governments, through improved accessibility, forms conversion, searchable content and streamlined FOIA requests, employees are using PDF software to not only improve critical functions like scanning, archiving and converting of documents, but also to greatly enhance the way they communicate with their peers and constituents.

Connected PDFs Provide Many Benefits

Here are a few ways that innovative PDF solutions can benefit government agencies:

• Multiple users can be part of a single document review, allowing all parties to see each other’s comments and respond – spurring discussion and sharing of ideas;
• Employees can share content quickly and easily by generating a file link and sending it via email;
• Agencies can track the usage of any document and view business intelligence information such as understanding who accessed the file, what actions they performed, what pages they looked at, etc.;
• Users can view all versions of the document in an intuitive document version tree;
• Readers can automatically be notified when a new version of the document is available;
• Document creators can better manage comments within documents;
• Dynamic commenting tools allow employees to provide feedback to documents through annotation and text markup tools – making feedback more effective with boxes, circles, arrows, and drawing tools.

PDF is already governments preferred format for documents. But some agencies continue to use old versions of the technology that were developed before the internet became ubiquitous. It is time for the government sector to adopt innovative PDF technology that provides new collaboration and sharing tools and a more controllable document.

Thanks for reading.

Let me know what you think about these suggestions by posting a comment.