How Adobe Sign and Laserfiche empower the rise of the citizen developer

It was more than a year ago when our working world was turned on its head. IT professionals scrambled to create secure private networks, get laptops into the hands of every employee, route landlines to mobile phones, and provide remote tools and technology that kept employees collaborating and business moving. Sure, there were some hiccups, but now we seem to have worn in our new desks, mastered the mute button, and in most industries, the way we do business has adjusted to this new normal.

Hybrid is here to stay

This new hybrid environment has shown that our digital transformation initiatives are more important than ever. As companies react to a shifting list of business needs, departmental processes and workflow improvements have become less of a priority.

Meet the citizen developer

Citizen developers, while they likely have their day jobs outside the IT department, are our digital superheroes who have stepped up to provide their departments improved operational efficiency, automated tasks, and better digital experiences. Thus, freeing up over-taxed IT personnel to focus on more complex and mission-critical development projects.

Since the pandemic has limited personal interactions, two areas of particular interest to citizen developers have been converting paper forms and contracts to digital PDFs and adding e-signature features to these documents. The intent is to eliminate all manual and paper-based processes, which drastically improves document turnaround time while saving money on paper, printing, faxing, postage and storage.

Let’s explore what a citizen-developed solution could do using Laserfiche and Adobe Sign e-signatures. Laserfiche is a no-code platform for document workflows that offers a drag-and-drop form builder, an intuitive canvas on which to draw approval routing, and a system activity editor with a palette of data integration options. Adobe Sign is an e-signature solution that can be integrated within virtually any document workflow without requiring any coding experience.

A great example of how citizen developers are using these tools is a state agency that created digital statements-of-work for sign off from other agencies. They drew out a form to collect the parameters of the requested project. The form contents were loaded automatically by Laserfiche into a statement of work document in Word for internal editing and approval routing. Once approved, Laserfiche automatically sent it as a PDF through Adobe Sign for e-signature from the requester. The whole process became digital with much shorter turnaround times.

Learn more about Laserfiche and Adobe Sign.

Keep in mind that things may likely never go back to exactly the way they were. The new normal is a hybrid work environment with lots of room for citizen developers to contribute using low code, no code tools to keep departmental work flowing and business moving.