Secure digital signing for regional council with Secured Signing

Lockyer Valley Regional Council enhances document security, visibility and efficiency with Secured Signing

Secured Signing for Lockyer Valley Regional Council

Digital signatures were on Lockyer Valley Regional Councils technology roadmap for a few years.

Ajana Ranatunge (Coordinator ICT Projects and Business Operations) led the discovery stage, which involved bringing departments together and understanding the business requirements. Once the use cases and document processes were defined, they approached the market.

The decision to begin this project was made by the ICT Operations and Executive team.

Budget was allocated for a digital transformation project to align with the organisation’s sustainability goals to reduce printing, scanning, sending, and storage of their signed documents.

“There were lots of paper in-trays getting clogged up with documents to be signed. We really didn’t want to be filling up the CEO’s desk with stacks of paperwork. It goes back to basics and common sense.” – Ajana Ranatunge, Coordinator ICT Projects and Business Operations.

Evaluation
 

Key considerations before entering the vendor evaluation process for digital signatures were reducing wait times and having greater visibility (who needs to sign, how do they need to sign, and when do they need to sign).

“We are local government which means we need to go through our vendor process including RFQ, evaluation and weighting of each digital signature vendor. At the time, we decided to choose Secured Signing, which in hindsight, was a good decision.” – Ajana Ranatunge, Coordinator ICT Projects and Business Operations.

Selecting Secured Signing
 

Budget was allocated for the project

From an IT (Information Technology) perspective, the key benefits of Secured Signing were:

  • Security – Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) elements of the platform.
  • Security- Single-Sign On with Azure Directory.
  • Efficiency – the workflows of the signing process.
  • Traceability- the tracking and visibility of the signing process.

This covered the majority of the security aspects of Lockyer Valley Regional Council’s organisation.

Implementation
 

“We know it was a good decision, because now, a lot of people cannot go without Secured Signing.”

The change management process for Lockyer Valley was straightforward as they had recently undertaken similar transformation projects prior to digital signatures.

“Once we ran through the system and had a trial period, there was greater buy-in and adoption.”

Lockyer Valley started off with a small group of people involving key personnel who were interested in using digital signatures for their specific use case- generating letters. It was a small project, but it was easy to see the opportunity that implementing a digital signature system would provide the organisation.

In the beginning there were between 20-30 staff, separated into two main groups, who started to use Secured Signing: Business Support and Engineers. Business Support staff were focused on generating letters, whereas the Engineers were focused on using the iSign and WeSign feature with their external Contractors.

Today, Lockyer Valley has 70 people using Secured Signing. The solution provided business continuity benefits allowing staff to sign and arrange signing from any location specially when COVID-19 hit, and staff were forced to work from home.

Using Secured Signing
 

Lockyer Valley Regional Council implemented Secured Signing across the organisation as their Enterprise Digital Signing platform. Unless the document in question needs a wet signature (such as a court order) then everyone must use the platform to sign their documents. Traceability being a key consideration, the general workflows set up for their document signing processes enabled staff to get things done efficiently and stress-free.

“Definitely there is traceability with the audit trails but is also the completion emails being invaluable for records management with the right departments getting the right documents at the right time. From Payroll to HR, the workflows operate well and ensure nothing goes unnoticed.”

Secured Signing meant the information management staff no longer needed to print and scan signed documents, with the added simplicity of drag-and-dropping the completed files into the folders within their document management system.

Secure Signing For Any Document
 

Being a small-to-medium sized Council, all internal staff are utilising the Secured Signing platform.

“Whether it’s certificates, community notifications, or food licenses, we utilise Secured Signing everywhere in the organisation. Working from home or getting a customer to sign a document has never been easier than with Secured Signing.” – Ajana Ranatunge, Coordinator ICT Projects and Business Operations.

Customer Support & Feature Requests
 

Customer support has been quick to respond. Additional feature requests have been developed by Secured Signing for the Council.

“Gal Thompson and Mike Eyal listened to our concerns and with quick turnaround, these features are now available to Lockyer Valley Regional Council, as well as any user within the Secured Signing platform.”

“It’s a very handy tool to have.”

Lockyer Valley Regional Council continues to use Secured Signing and has been seeing increased interest in the digital signature space. An example being local Australian councils approaching Ajay for a referral, which he is happy to give.