In the digital era, paper forms do not need pointless digital replicas. Properly redesigned services will see unnecessary transactions from individual agencies streamlined, joined-up or abolished — driving down costs and improving frontline services. The paper-era forms and manual processes — and the clerical functions supporting them — will disappear from government services designed for the digital era.
Using technology merely to put existing forms and transactions online was never a good idea: it propagates a failed and socially divisive model from the era of mass duplication and paper-based inefficiency. It forces the citizen to do the hard work, providing the same information time after time after time, simply because of the poor design of public services within their current organisational fiefdoms. Forms are a clumsy, paper-era means of capturing data, as Amazon and other digital organisations have long since shown.
Digital era government needs to see transactions, processes and organisations simplified, stripped away, abolished, combined or transformed. Government will make much smarter use of data it already holds, simplifying the citizens’ experience of public services and providing governments with timely insight into what works and what doesn’t.
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