Leveraging AI and Adobe–Microsoft Integration to Streamline Government Digital Services

Transcript

Okay, over to you. So there was a once upon a time program that had everything digitized, everything was working smoothly, and everything was centralized, efficient as it were. Or this is what we hope we can say in a few years about all the government that you work with.

So I’m Christian, I’m working with Ensemble.

It’s one of the platforms. Sorry? It’s the one on the platform. They get to manage with this. Perfect. Correct.

So I’m working for Ensemble. Ensemble is an Adobe partner for over 20 years.

And Yukon is part of Canada and they asked us if we can help them digitize their forms and bring them up to speed because this is a problem that’s more and more seen right now.

Although a lot of governments want to see their people happy, their employees happy, and one of the ways of doing this is by taking them in this new digitization form.

Right. So what are the benefits? We can say that the benefits are quite easy to see. I saw it firsthand when working for another city where they needed forms.

And firstly, they focused on forms that needed, that the people that had accessibility needs used. So for example, people that could come to the building to complete the forms. So they focused on that and they improved the citizen experience a lot by this. And also there’s also the matter of accessibility. So once you port to digital, they kind of all fit together. So what did we do actually? The problem with digitizing form is AM forms are quite powerful, but it takes a lot of time to manually drag and drop, to gather the specifications. And they are also user prone. They are also prone to user errors. So we kind of have to have a way to go around all these problems. Instead of gathering a huge developer team to gather a lot, to make a lot of forms in a short time, we try to make another way.

So this was the goal. The goal was to simplify the process and scale it as much as possible and to show a constant delivery velocity. So it doesn’t depend on if one of your developers is off or what the problem is. Something that can work for itself as much as possible.

And to do this, we thought of a workflow. So what’s the workflow? The workflow is we started from the documents. The documents itself, the specifications for the documents are usually provided by the client. And you can get the specifications. We can pass it through an AI that extracts all of this.

And then we can standardize the input block. Once you gather the data, we standardize it. And then we can pass it to a generator. Once we have it in the generator, this generator will automatically transform it into an adaptive form. And it can do a bunch of things. So here is where we metaphorically took the red pill and we went in the matrix to see what’s an adaptive form actually. So an adaptive form is a bunch of readable text, if you can believe it.

And we started to browse the multiple adaptive forms to see what can we actually control, what can we actually do. And once we saw that, we can control a bunch of stuff. So from the layout, to its organization, to what’s visible, what’s not, to the different elements that are present, with different accessibility things and the logic that is needed for them. So once we saw that, we thought, all right, so we can work with this. This is where the form generator was born. This is a simple example of how we did a part for a radio button. So for example, you have a form and you need a radio button to say hi, say yes or no. And we’ve took what we saw before in the matrix, we’ve translated it to some code, and now we are ready to have the generator comes out of simple form with a button.

All right, so going further, this logic applies to all of the other elements, be it a fragment, text field, everything can be controlled like this, and everything can be interested depending on how we want them, how do we set up the flow.

Right, but now we know that we have the documents, the specifications, we have the generator. But what should the generator consume in order to have it standardized? Because as you might know, clients come to you with a bunch of different ways to provide the specifications, from PDF to sticky notes, you name it. So we tried to get all this and manage it into something that’s easily maintainable, anyone can understand, and it’s, I think, older than me, easily. And this is the good old Excel.

So right now, what do we have? We have a standardized input based on different things, based on different, whatever the client throws at us. We use AI to extract it, we create the Excel, and the question is right now, who creates the Excel? Well, back in the day, it used to be interns or developers, or whoever was around.

Right, right now we have access to this wonderful thing called AI. Once we saw the different ways that the client can provide to us the specifications, we mapped out different ways of getting the data. So for example, if you work with a team, one of them provides us, as I said, the specifications in a PDF form. We can map everything, but another one from his team works with, I don’t know, Microsoft Visio, and that generates a different type of output. Well, we can use AI to gather all of this data and standardize it into our good old Excel. By the way, did you know that Excel competitions exist? I didn’t know until recently. It’s crazy to see. Alright, so after we prompted this to the AI, we showed him, okay, this is the data, this is the Excel we created.

This is a good example, and this is what you should have. Alright, so how it all fits together.

The documents specification, they are made by getting it started by AI. The AI creates the Excel that will be fed to the generator, and the generator creates an adaptive form. From this same generator input, we can also push the forms to different AM instances.

So it kind of answers the problem that we had. Like, now the process is more streamlined, now it’s less to error prone, we can push to multiple instances at once, and it’s just probably also means just a bit of picking at the end with the rules and everything.

Alright, but then what happens? So we cannot just go to, I don’t know, branch of the government and say, okay, use this, this is how you will work from now on. No, we cannot do that. What we have to do instead is see how they work and plug into that so we can help them, not make their life harder. So in this case, we use the SharePoint integration, the client used SharePoint. So what happened was AM had, so from AM, whenever we submitted the form, the data was gathered and organized very nicely and tidy into whatever they wanted. So for example, year, month, day, and so on and so forth. And it made everything centralized, it made the data gathering much more simpler, and it was easier for them to work with it, because you couldn’t have any more issues with who organizes what.

Another thing that they needed was in their forms, they were gathering some documents for their citizens. For example, you want to have the form data in a place, but you also need to have multiple documents that they’ve inputted in a similar place, or at least to know where it is. Also, when the user submits like four documents, you don’t know which is which. So for this, we’ve asked the Adobe engineers, we’ve said, pretty please, can we do something about it? And they’ve come in very handy, they helped us a lot with this. They created a way, so after the form is done, the documents are saved somewhere and the workflow is started, which renames the documents in a way that you can configure from AM forms, and it helps with organizing. So who is the document for, what time is it, and a bunch of other things that you can configure straight out from AM forms. What this did in turn is, it standardized everything, the quality and where you can find the info, and also it made the government workers much happier, because their life is simpler now. And I can say that, quite probably, that this suggestion was implemented in AM forms and is now part of the AM form since September.

Right, now I could say that, let’s talk about numbers, how much we improved this, what are the KPIs, but I won’t do that. All I can say is, I think with this, we can get more forms to more people, and that will increase their quality of life, and I think this is what matters. This is me, Vishal. Thank you very much.