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Leadership Summit empowers ITD staff
to manage electronic forms, improving efficiency

Janet French was puzzling over how to solve a bottleneck in the management of electronic forms. Her challenge: How to update and edit forms when she was the only staff member who had access to them.

The recent Leadership Summit gave her the opportunity to collaborate with others on a solution.

VIDEO: Watch Tabitha Smith's opening pitch at the Leadership Summit Oct. 24.

“The single largest problem was that you couldn’t post on Form Finder without my help,” French said. “There was limited access.”

Other duties and responsibilities made it difficult for her to make needed changes to forms. One solution that was considered involved creating a small team that would have access to Form Finder; possibly a team of five people.

After consulting with Char McArthur, the department’s chief administrative officer, French was encouraged to think more broadly and use the Leadership Summit as a way to engage others to find a solution.

French and fellow Summit team members Tabitha Smith and Leslye Nelson realized that the most efficient approach was to increase access to forms, and give ownership to the subject matter expert or author of the form.

To do that, the Form Finder platform was moved to a SharePoint site. This increased access to the approximately 1,018 forms used by ITD. Other improvements included being able to know which forms collect personally identifiable information, and allowing form owners to make changes to forms that are owned by others. That feature increases the ability to make changes quickly should a primary owner of a form be unavailable, and updates need to be made.

If the owner of a form likes the features of another form, they can incorporate those into the form they’re responsible for. And there are safeguards to ensure a previous version of a form isn’t lost when changes are made to it.

“You can go back to previous versions of forms,” French said. “And you have to be a form owner or a subject matter expert to make changes.”

The new form finder platform went live on July 1 of this year, and the reaction has been positive. “People like being able to do things themselves,” Smith said. “This gives autonomy back to people.”