Digitized Forms

I read the FCW piece on this report. I'd forgotten there was a law requiring agencies to digitize their forms and make them fully on-line, including e-signature, but there is.

The report shows agencies haven't met the legal deadline for many of their forms: USDA is one of the laggards. 

I remember back in the early 1990s working to use WordPerfect 5.0 to design forms, or rather to convert the form designed used the old tools to a digitized form.  WordPerfect had a table feature with which, using a lot of patience, you could create a pretty close version of the old printed forms.  The Forms shop in MSD took up the challenge and did a lot of the ASCS/CCC forms before I retired.

Of course there's a big difference between the forms we did and what the law requires--I gather the ideal now is a fillable pdf file with e-signature activated.  I don't know how far FSA has progressed in meeting that goal.

I'm cynical enough to believe that most forms which meet the law's requirements probably are still poorly designed for online operations.  I expect the same human factors are operating with forms as they were with cars--the early cars were designed as "horseless carriages". I wonder how many filing cabinets FSA offices have filled with paper copies. 

[Updated--I see that FSA's newest form, FSA-2637, is a fillable pdf which can be signed on-line. Good for the people who did this.]