Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 09/20/04 issue

Paper Cut

By Joab Jackson , GCN Staff

XML e-forms empty the in-box

The Office of Management and Budget last year began requiring all Exhibit 300 data to be tagged in Extensible Markup Language—a change that distressed more than a few agency planners.

They had been submitting business cases for their systems projects as word processing files or on paper.

Although XML has been touted as a universal format for data exchange among disparate systems, its use so far has been limited mostly to specialized XML tools.

Several software vendors, however, came to the rescue by making their standard products XML-capable.

Microsoft Corp., which had helped OMB set up a workflow system to process XML-encoded business cases, brought out a beta version of its InfoPath electronic forms design software for OMB.

Microsoft’s federal office in Washington worked out an Exhibit 300 version that could be filled in with Microsoft Word and saved as an XML document, tagged to OMB’s specifications.

InfoPath, as well as the new LiveCycle suite of products from Adobe Systems Inc., can graft XML capabilities onto office software already present on most government computers. Agencies such as the IRS and Government Accountability Office use Adobe Portable Document Format extensively to capture paper documents in secure electronic form.

LiveCycle lets agencies use PDF to create electronic forms.

Nevada’s State Welfare Division found another use for PDF: to speed workflow, said Gary Stagliano, deputy administrator for program and field operations.

The division handles food stamp, child support and energy assistance programs for low-income citizens. Nevada’s 500 case managers used to fill out the forms by hand and mail them to a single facility for data entry and processing.

With the help of integrator Covansys Corp. of Farmington Hills, Mich., and IBM Corp., the state built a workflow system for the information.

Because state courts had specified formats for the casework forms, the state could not buy simple e-form software. Instead, it used Adobe’s Accelio Forms Designer, which rendered PDFs that exactly reproduced the dimensions of the paper versions.

More news on related topics: Business Process Management, E-Government, Enterprise Architecture, IT Infrastructure, Management, Web Strategies



GCN Popup