Many of us in the esignature community are somewhat mystified by the slowness of industry to adopt electronic signatures. The ROI is demonstrated and generally accepted to be quite high for many documents, with improved productivity, reduced errors, more rapid processing, improved customer satisfaction and many other benefits. So it is remarkable that the government is leading the way ahead of many respected, world class companies in the private sector. The IRS has been willing to accept electronic tax filings from most individuals since 1998 and now receives over half of it filings electronically.
The Department of Education processes 14 million Financial Aid applications a year and is seeing significant growth in the electronic applications. They claim that none of the electronically signed applications has ever been contested. There is a nice presentation on the Department of Education’s roll-out from the ESRA Conference last month here.
An interesting opinion of Education’s authors:
Implementation will not be constrained by the technology or legal issues. It is constrained by the business side and its ability to handle the process re-engineering and the organizational willingness to change issues.
I guess it means that the Department of Education is more willing to change than most of our Fortune 100 institutions. Does this seem to match your experience?
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It’s not been slow for us at Yozons. We’re continuing to see strong interest in the 1Q2008, though the slowing US economy is putting some brakes on budgets for departments to implement electronic signatures.
Forward looking companies realize that by investing now, they save more and make more, and of course electronic signatures are not particularly expensive except for the smallest of businesses. Of course, if your business market segment is slow, electronic signatures won’t solve that, but if you have business, it can definitely help consummate deals faster and save expenses.
I agree that it seems odd, and companies who have to deal with a very competitive markets today, should think about implementing e-signature solutions as a way of being more efficient and competitive.
If you’re interested, there’s some useful background (non-commercial) information about digital signatures at http://www.arx.com/digital-signatures-faq.php