Award Winning SmartForms in Government!

Canberra Connect is the gateway to services provided by the ACT Government - what they are, how much they cost, where to pay for them and who to contact. Canberra Connect’s service portal provides businesses and the community access to SmartForms that cover an extensive range of services from across eight major departments and multiple business units.

Through a strong collaborative approach with Avoka, the ACT Government has implemented a SmartForms platform that supports the completion, lodgement, payment and workflow management of online services. This has resulted in improved productivity with faster and more efficient response for businesses, the communityand other government agencies. In recognition of the impact the service has had on the lives of Australian citizens, the community and business, Canberra Connect has been recognised in the Australian Government’s e-Awards.

Forms are vital to the ACT Government’s operations.  Across the eight departments at least 800 customer facing forms are used.  Available via a variety of websites for download, the original static forms lack consistency in format and style, were often difficult to use and understand and did not support workflow automation.

“Our objectives for the SmartForms project required a technology and integration partner who could help us to design and deliver consistent forms, integrate them easily with a payment facility, provide a re-usable library of common form components – all to reduce our time to market and provide a growth path to support a whole of government forms capacity,” outlined Christine Morris, Manager, Payment Services Integration Team, Canberra Connect. 

Canberra Connect was aware of the Adobe LiveCycle solution through demonstrations and needed an integration partner with the capability to implement the solution successfully with an ambitious timeframe.  The Avoka team strongly demonstrated the LiveCycle solution expertise along with critical soft-skills such as business acumen, flexibility and understanding of user behaviour. SmartForms is a solution focused on improving customer service and containing operational costs of the ACT Government in its dealings with customers.

"The essential word to describe the SmartForms project is ‘collaboration'. Avoka worked with us to ensure success of a major project that delivered both on time and on budget. SmartForms scored '10 out of 10', exceeding all stakeholders’ expectations and Avoka delivered, through their expertise, more than what was initially visualised.” 
Christine Morris, Manager, Payment Services Integration Team, Canberra Connect. 

The business analysis and process re-engineering conducted prior to the contract being awarded offered substantial benefits. Avoka was able to focus on the rapid development of the priority forms, establishment of the template library containing common form components and training ACT Government staff in SmartForms creation and management.

• Improved customer service: SmartForms allow the community to access electronic forms “anytime, anywhere”, provides for convenient form submission and enables immediate payment for services.  The forms are consistent in their look and feel, easy-to-use and contain information prompts and embedded business rules that help to reduce inaccurate data.  By submitting forms and payments on-line, customers no longer need to travel to shopfronts and queue for services.
• Improved productivity: SmartForms provides the capability for line-of-business areas to improve their productivity.  Form data is sent electronically in real time to the owing business unit which enables process automation, removing the need to re-key data.  SmartForms can facilitate the use of shared web-services for common tasks such as data validation (eg. address validation, ABN look-up) and support processes that access and update internal line-of-business systems.  An example of improved productivity through the use of SmartForms is the Lease Conveyancing Enquiry.  The turnaround time for delivery of the enquiry results back to the customer has reduced from 3-4 days for a standard enquiry’s hardcopy results down to 15 minutes turnaround time from completed form submission to email delivery back to the customer of the enquiry results.
• Improved ACT Government on-line presence: SmartForms provides a simplified process for the design and deployment of ACT Government forms, particularly interactive forms with embedded payment capability accessed via the Internet.  In the initial six months of operations, SmartForms has receipted over $15 million in revenue, through the successful processing of over 37,000 transactions.
• Automated workflow management: The SmartForms solution supports workflow management by providing the ability to fully automate and streamline agency and cross-agency processes.  This continues to result in even further improvements in response time and service delivery.
• Centralised operations provide efficient administration and data management: The SmartForms solution is deployed on extensible infrastructure to support growth.  Central management of the system provides efficient and economical operational environment.