Welcome to the Statescoops Podcast Series on IT Modernization in Government, under written this week on Amazon Web Services. I'm your host Wyatt Cash, and in this week's episode, we're taking a look at how officials in California, Sonoma County streamline their digital business processes, and we'll explore how implementing a cloud-based e-signature tool played an important role. Our guests today include Jim Mckenny, Project Manager, Information Systems Department in Sonoma County, Jim as a veteran systems and data analyst who has worked for state and municipal governments for his entire career. Jim, thanks so much for joining us, and welcome to the program.
Thanks for having me. Also joining us is Carolyn Statch, Director of Innovation for the Information Systems Department at Sonoma County. Carolyn has been recognized as a pioneer in artificial intelligence for her efforts in harnessing data and technology in government, helping Sonoma County respond to devastating wildfires in the Northern California region. Carolyn, thank you for joining us as well, and welcome to the program.
Thank you for having me, Wyatt. I'm happy to be here. Well, Jim, let's start by asking you to briefly describe the scope of IT and digital services that your department supports on behalf of Sonoma County and its constituents. Sure.
Sonoma County is located in Northern California. We've got a population of about 500,000 people. The Central IT department has 117 employees that support the entire enterprise of about 4,100 employees. We have about 41 departments, and each of those departments may have some of their own IT services.
In terms of digital services, we provide them support for products like BSign, document imaging, and enterprise content management. Our general budget for IT right now is about $53 million. Well, Jim, talk to us a little more about what were some of the key issues that led Sonoma County to digitize its operations, and at what point did it become clear that implementing a more robust e-signature system was critical to that journey? Well, the digitization has been going on for many years in terms of scanning documents, but in terms of any signature solution, we started looking in 2015.
We had numerous different solutions out there that were ad hoc, and we needed something that was cohesive and supportable for the enterprise. And we happened to be doing our enterprise agreement or true up for Adobe Acrobat, and we were also looking at Adobe Sign at the same time and able to add Adobe Sign has part of that solution. But it's been going on since 2015 and really continues as a day. What were some of the top considerations in selecting an e-signature platform, and what were maybe two or three of the biggest issues you encountered once you started implementing that system, then other government CIOs and agency leaders might benefit from knowing?
Well, as a California entity, our biggest concern was conformance and compliance with the state of California's Secretary of State guidelines, and that was critical for us, and it was very important to be able to meet the needs and concerns for our county council. The second concern that we encountered was simply terminology. People didn't know when we were talking about an e-signature versus a digital certificate versus those types of technologies. They were using them as one and the same, and they weren't, and so we had to do a lot of education.
And so those are the kind of things that were challenging for us, but the benefit was Adobe Sign was actually in the process of implementing those changes to make things easier to understand, but it was a big consideration, and the biggest one for us was ease of use. Well, Caroline, let me bring you into the conversation here. Looking a bit more broadly, how did Sonoma County go about deciding which business processes got top priority as in your department, started implementing your e-signature system, and what metrics were used to define success? So generally in IT, you look for the low-hanging fruit.
Everyone's used to that game plan. So pick some easy projects, get some quick wins under your belt, and move forward. And when it comes to e-signatures and digitization, typically that brings high volume to the top of the list. In case what we were really aiming for was exposure and increased funding, which is not just unique to the government sector, but is definitely a problem that the public sector faces more than the private sector.
So we looked at how can we pilot with specific target audiences and key stakeholders? And with that in mind, and using this pilot approach, we made three specific choices. The first one was an e-form and workflow that actually was a paper-based process used by the entire county. So every employee, every manager, and every department head uses this particular process called staff to have reimbursement.
And that allowed us to get exposure in use, demonstrate how simple the process was, and how we could improve business turnaround time. The second one we did was public facing. And so we targeted a form specifically that was facing our citizens, and we picked a workflow that citizens were likely to engage in piloting with us, and that was specific to the application for grants. And then the third form we targeted was for the legal side of the house, because we really had been struggling with county council and perceptions around what's legal, when is a wet signature required, and really this belief that wet signatures were more secure than electronic signatures, which was a myth that really required a lot of debunking on our side.
So we targeted that group with litigation holds, which involved county council and all of the county departments related to either pending or current litigation. And in having them be an early adopter in the pilot, they became less hesitant around adopting this technology and really became a great sponsor for the initiative altogether. As far as metrics are involved, typical metrics, reducing time for business process. The three combined that I just mentioned, the time from start to finish in the workflow was reduced more than 70%.
And dashboard reporting were also key tools used in the metrics, load balancing of workers, the ability to reassign workflows, all of these things were part of that equation of metrics. And then lastly, cloud enabled solution, which removed the need for county network access. We're also part of the metrics involved. That's an impressive plan of attack.
Back to you, Jim, can you share maybe some more personal examples of how employees were able to work more efficiently or where agencies saw significant general resource savings as a result of deploying an integrated e-signature platform? Well, I do want to touch on that after relevant form. We had an ROI of $209,000 a year just on that one form. More importantly, how employees utilize Adobe Sign and Empowerism, one example in our ShareS Department, they had a paper-based process that had to go out to 240 employees to verify various training that they have attended, such as a fire extinguisher training.
And it was a paper-based process that took one to two months to go out and send out the paper, get it signed, and get it back, and process for each of their verifications of training and different types of processes. And when we introduced Megasign, we were able to send out a single form for a signature to 240 plus deputies and uniform staff. And within a few minutes, and I say literally minutes, we were getting the documents back. I was with the person doing it, and I watched the forms come back in immediately.
Our turnaround time that was one to two months was reduced down to two weeks. And that's just one person. We have another person using it in our general services for work orders. And this is a classic where when we let the horse out of the barn, this was a person who was able to automate their work request system and funding requests and put together a workflow with three to four signatures and do it successfully by simply watching the videos on the Adobe support site.
We have got many, many others, some of the healthcare where we're doing client-provider certifications, where the provider has to verify services. And these are nurses using Adobe Sign by themselves. Like I said, we have 21 departments. We average about 1,900 documents a month going out through a number of various groups.
And really, we've got 20 more departments to actually find out why they're not using it right now and wherever we can make it more efficient for them. Well, Carolyn, can you also share some examples of where the public, either businesses or citizens, also saw a market improvement in service quality or processing time as a result of deploying e-signatures? Absolutely. So one of the ones I mentioned earlier, the community development grants, that's a process whereby community providers of services or products would fill out an application which used to be just a fillable form.
Then they would print the form, sign the form, email it to the county administrators, office, who would then process the application after getting it out of their email. Any questions back and forth all happened through email. So very manual process. The final completion point for the citizen was really your application is now accepted.
The next step, which was completely invisible to the citizen, was a review process by the supervisors who were allocating funds and approving applications to get funds. At the end of the day, with the supervisor's approval, the CAO, county administrator, would then actually sign a contract using a WET signature. And the citizen or the community service provider would receive all of their information back and forth with attachments and emails. And we revised that.
We created fillable forms with workflow. The Adobe electronic signature allowed the citizen or community provider to sign electronically. So there was no printing, creating an email, attaching it to the email and then dealing with email back and forth. So everything happened seamlessly within the workflow.
The routing after the initial approval that the application was complete went electronically with supervisors who can also sign off with an electronic signature. That then routes to the county administrator automatically and the contract documents are produced within that workflow and they use an Adobe signature to sign off. So it would take months and months to go through this in the old way. In fact, I think the best way to sum it up is that the county administrator and the board of supervisors only did this process.
The opportunity was only available to apply in the first quarter of the calendar year. That was it for an entire year. And with the change and the digitization electronic signatures incorporated into that, this is now an application process that is available year round. What used to take up to six months to complete can be completed literally within days or weeks, just depending on the nature of the submission and the complexity of the application.
So that's a huge one. The second one I would bring up really quick is that as many of your listeners know, Sonoma County has been hit with repeated fires, 2017, 2019. We just had another big one this year. And so we've done a debris removal form where before if you were a property owner who had damage, you would have to come into environmental health and physically fill out the paperwork, verify that you were the property owner, extremely manual process and very difficult for people who have lost property, including their homes.
So with electronic signatures and workflow, we've actually created a process where the property owner can fill everything out online. They can scan or take a picture of their driver's license, submit that, do the electronic signature, they can look up the personal number and everything has become automated. So very significant improvements for the citizen experiences. Finally, Carolyn and Jim, what are you still hoping to accomplish with an e-signature platform?
And what advice would you offer other government sector leaders in taking full advantage of e-signatures, especially in light of all the other IT priorities that they also need to tackle? I'd say for us is the integration of Adobe Sign with Microsoft 365, for sure. That is coming forward in 2021 for us. And that really helped us leverage what is probably the biggest advice, I'd say, is really examining your business processes and how can you optimize them in using these tools.
The other part of it too is we're looking to also integrate Adobe Sign with our enterprise information platform from Highland. Both of these are critical digital services that we offer and that we can leverage in the cloud with a number of efficiencies. But the key point here is, in order to be efficient, you need to understand your business processes. Understanding those processes before you start to digitize them is critically important.
What I would like to add is especially for government, if you can't get full adoption to start with piloting, that's exactly how we began. Our digital transformation initiative, we said, it's time for us to start. We're going to go, let's just pilot something. So we used Adobe, we had third party workflow providers.
We didn't even have a tenant in AWS when we began the pilot. So imagine all the things we had to stand up and we were pleasantly surprised with how easy it was working with AWS platform. But think of all the things we were really piloting, even as an IT department. And yet within a few months, we had implemented successfully a third party workflow solution with Adobe electronic signatures in the AWS cloud to the entire county workforce.
So I would strongly advise pilot, you can do big things with very small scope and get some good early success and experience. Well, those are like some great tips. I'm afraid we're going to have to leave it there for today though. Jim McKinney and Carolyn Stats, thanks so much for joining us to talk about how Sonoma County is helping its employees serve the public more effectively through digitalized business processes and e-signatures.
Thanks. It was great to be here. It was very nice. Thank you.
And thanks to Amazon Web Services as well for underwriting today's episode. Look for more of our coverage of IT modernization in government on statesgroup.com and subscribe to our state school radio channel on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher and TuneIn. This is why I cash. Thanks for tuning in.