eGovernment

The process of developing policies, procedures, legislation, memoranda or regulations involves hundreds or even thousands of employees and officials whose expertise and consultation result in final decisions. Orchestrating the decision-making process among all participants is laborious, involving many rounds of discussion, review, and revisions, until it's time for the final consideration, approval, and dissemination of each decision.

Quark can help you adopt an eGovernment solution to streamline your desicion-making process. The result is an easier, faster process that helps governments and large non-government organizations use technology to conduct business, vastly reduce the amount of paper commonly required to produce policies, legislation, and regulations, and make better-informed decisions.

Manual Processes Slow the Decision-Making Process

During the creation and review of policy, legislative and regulatory documents, many people from various agencies and departments contribute, comment on, correct, and revise these documents as they make their way through the system. Because many people share these tasks based on their expertise or role, you have to coordinate contributions across offices, agencies, buildings, and specialists.

But how do you make sure that each person sees the parts of those documents for which they are responsible? How do you make sure that each section is properly reviewed? How do you make sure that everyone has had an opportunity for input before you move to the next step in developing legislation?

Too often, the answer to these questions involves a time-consuming process that requires the manual passing of documentation from one individual to the next. This prevents decisions from being made efficiently and effectively.

How Publishing Technology Can Speed up Your Process

Cabinet ministers, legislators, regulators, and policy-makers want to make sure that the right people review the right information at the right time so that all of the pieces come together and are correct. The key is to use technology to improve collaboration among all contributors in the decision-making process — and that's exactly what Quark's solution is designed to help you do.

Quark's eGovernment Solution

Quark's eGovernment solution connects everyone in the decision-making process through a single system based on their role, giving them a portal to view documents and identify the portions they need to author or review. It automatically routes documents to the next person in the process, indicating when someone hasn't completed their portion. It lets individuals revise or just comment, based on their role, rank, or responsibility.

Based on Extensible Markup Language (XML), Quark's solution allows writers and reviewers to mark components of policy, legislative or regulatory documents with the purpose of each component, including items such as the departments that will need to act on that information. Subsequent reviewers see only those components that are relevant to their role, which speeds up the process by ensuring that they see everything they need to see, but only what they need to see.

How It Works

The cornerstone of Quark's solution is Quark XML Author for Microsoft Word, an add-in to Word that lets anyone create XML easily, painlessly, and with virtually no training. Authors can continue using Word, and they have access to all of Word's capabilities for tracking changes and adding comments.

Quark also offers server-based technology that keeps track of each document's progress through the process, to make sure that everyone follows every step. And when a reviewer requests a document, the irrelevant information can be stripped out automatically so that reviewers see only the information they need - or are authorized - to see.

At the conclusion of the process, when everyone has signed off, Quark's solution automatically publishes the final document in both print and online formats.

Features and Benefits

Did You Know?

Quark is a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner and member of the Office 14 Developer Advisory Council.

• Large-scale collaboration: Thousands of people, from entry-level clerks to the highest level of government, can interact with the system because of its ease-of-use and its access controls based on role and department
• Greater efficiency: Replacing paper with electronic delivery speeds up distribution and searching
• Faster process: Software automatically enforces rules for document structure, document design, and workflow, reducing or eliminating delays due to missing content, incorrect formatting, or missing approvals
• Better security: Information may be viewed or changed only by those who are authorized
• Easy to use: XML complexity remains hidden while users continue to use Word; the software prompts the user for any required information