Using CMS Forms to support digital transformation

CMS Forms can support you in achieving your digital transformation goals.

On this page:

• The challenge of digital transformation
• The benefits of starting with CMS Forms
  • Create modern experiences - now
  • Add a new service channel
  • Reduce processing costs
  • Reduce development costs
  • Save design effort
  • Save technical costs
  • Build capability and capacity
• CMS Forms: Ready when you are

The challenge of digital transformation

Moving towards "digital government" involves much more than just creating web forms. It's a complete business and technology transformation.

On the business side, you'll need to review, revise, replace or create things like:

• Service offerings and journeys
• Business processes and practices
• Policy, regulation and legislation

On the technical side, you may need to consider things like:

• Continuing to develop and support existing legacy systems
• Re-developing legacy systems using new technology stacks
• Building new, integrated applications or service portals

Government's resources are quite limited, so it will take a long time to transform all your ministry's programs and services.

The benefits of starting with CMS Forms

CMS Forms is corporate enabler that meets you where you are. It offers a stand-alone end-to-end solution that can adapt to your changing technical landscape. It can serve as both a foundation and accelerator for your digital transformation. The sooner you begin using CMS Forms, the sooner you'll see the benefits and be ready for the future.

Create modern experiences - now

Citizens have come to expect a modern service experience, even from government. There's no need to wait for legislation changes, project approvals, or developer capacity. With CMS Forms, you can create those modern, personalized experiences now regardless of your current technical capability.

Add a new service channel

Many program areas receive form submissions in-person, by mail or fax. Consistency of design is a requirement for effective and efficient processing and records. CMS Forms allows you to add online submission via email as a new service channel while receiving the exact same form as the other ones.

Reduce processing costs

All forms cost money to process. Submissions with errors or omissions can increase that cost several times over. CMS Forms provides you with the tools and capability to ensure submissions are complete and accurate, even when your form has multiple completion options that depend on the citizen's particular situation.

Reduce development costs

A portion of application development cost is in creating forms for that application. This cost will increase if you need advanced functionality, plus you'll need to employ developers to make changes to the forms. CMS Forms helps you save these costs by allowing your 'forms people' to design and maintain forms that can be simply embedded into the application.

Save design effort

An ongoing cost of creating and maintaining forms - whether PDF or web - is in employing and keeping current with the latest design standards. Government Digital Experience (GDX) manages these standards, and adjusts them according to government and citizen needs. Since CMS Forms is owned and managed by GDX, form authors can focus their time on the data and experience and know their forms will remain in alignment.

Save technical costs

Acquiring or building your own form platform can cost a lot when you factor in development, licensing, infrastructure and transaction fees. Even then, your platform may not be able to meet all your needs or be compliant with government policies. CMS Forms is managed by the same expert team that manages the government website (and many others) with the same reliability, resiliency and eye on compliance.

Build capability and capacity

Forms design and management is a key business capability that supports information processing and management. As individuals gain experience using CMS Forms, both the quality and speed of their work improves. As a ministry-wide platform, all your form authors can support all your forms, giving you flexibility in deciding how to best use your people to meet business and citizen needs.

CMS Forms: Ready when you are

CMS Forms is a very flexible platform, able to support you at various stages of your transformation journey. A sample path might be:

1. Create online forms for citizens and receive forms and data by email as a start
2. Optionally integrate with existing systems and databases if there's capability and value
3. Embed the forms into new service portals or applications being developed

How quickly you can progress through your journey will in part be based on your ministry's readiness.