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When a building permit application sits in an inbox for three days waiting for a reviewer to see it, that’s not a technology problem.

Most commercial e-signature tools treat signing as the endpoint of a transaction. In government, it’s where the real work begins.

A social services case moves from intake to eligibility determination to approval, touching three reviewers and two supervisors over six weeks.

When an applicant submits a building permit application, the work doesn’t start and stop at intake.The form routes through zoning review, plan review, fire marshal approval, and final inspection.

A permit application is not a document. It is the first step in a process that includes routing, approvals, payment collection, and records management.

When a process is too slow, the instinct is to look for the slowest-looking step and fix that. In government, that step is usually signature. Something needs sign-off, sign-off means paperwork, paperwork means printing, scanning, or chasing someone down the hall — so the fix seems obvious: get an e-signature tool.

In the public sector, critical benefits and services often start with a form. Licenses, registrations, benefits, permits — nearly all of it depends on residents successfully submitting information online. When that process breaks down, the cost shows up on both sides of the transaction.

When a federal reviewer flags an improper payment in a SNAP or Medicaid case, most people assume the underlying eligibility decision was wrong. The wrong person received benefits. The wrong amount was calculated. A verification step was skipped.

Court clerks and administrators didn’t need another challenge. They were already managing high case volumes, staff turnover, inconsistent processes across divisions, and a backlog of PDF-based forms that were never designed for the digital era. For most courts, keeping pace has always required more institutional knowledge than any system could hold.

Courts have always been asked to do more with less, but what changed in recent years is that the gap between what the public expects from government services and how court operations actually work became too wide to paper over. People who interact with courts today arrive with expectations shaped by every other digital experience in their lives — they expect to complete a form on their phone, track a submission without making a phone call, and move through a process without printing, signing, scanning, and trying to figure out where to send the result. Inside most courts, though, the process still runs on PDFs, email threads, and institutional knowledge that lives in one person’s head, and the intake form posted on the website is often a scanned document that hasn’t materially changed in years.

How many of your agency’s forms are fully digitized? For many, it is at least some. Since the pandemic, municipalities have been making applications for many of their core services available online to constituents. However, these documents tend to be exceptions to the rule; behind the scenes, there’s still a tall stack of papers that underpin manual workflows that drive less-used benefits and important internal processes.

There’s a moment that IT managers and operations leads at government agencies describe almost identically, regardless of what state they’re in or what department they work for.