How Nitro Helps Australian Local Governments Digitally Transform

If you’re in the IT department for a local council in Australia, you’re juggling significant challenges every day.

• Tight budgets: You need to get the most out of every dollar for technology and find ways to do more with less.
• Keeping up with the times: Constantly evolving technology forces you to digitise your workflows or risk falling behind.
• Going green on a shoestring: Sustainability is a big priority but can seem out of reach with a shrinking budget.

And all the while, you need to remain diligent about data security, privacy and compliance.

If you can relate, you’re in the right place. Let’s explore how to overcome these obstacles and ensure a smooth, safe and successful digital transformation.

A single, streamlined digital document solution with seamless PDF and eSigning workflows will help you accelerate digital transformation.

Overcoming all the challenges above with disparate document tools that limit your licences and just add more complexity to your IT stack is difficult, if not impossible.

There are plenty of solutions out there that seemingly offer ways to speed up approvals, introduce efficiencies and support your digital transformation. But what good are they when you have to block user access because you’ve hit your licencing cap? Is it really the best use of IT's time to manage another tool, especially if it creates new security risks?

So imagine how much time and stress you could free up with flexible licencing, easy integration, centralised administration and best-in-class security—all in one document solution.

A digital document solution that includes sophisticated PDF editing, eSigning and analytics tools provides several benefits for government organisations:

If your current PDF solution caps your number of users, it’s hindering productivity. How are you supposed to manage remote work or employee churn? That’s why Nitro provides the flexibility of a site licence with unlimited users so you can slash your licence management overhead costs and stop stressing over how many seats you need (but don’t have). We also deliver insights into licence usage so you can identify unused or underused licences and reallocate or optimise them.

A modern digital document solution integrates seamlessly with your existing IT infrastructure and software so you minimise tools and maximise productivity throughout your departments and locations. The right document solution supports collaboration without requiring more IT headcount to manage it.

PDF, eSigning and analytics tools combined into a single solution eliminates the need to maintain and pay for other software. You’ll consolidate costs while you coalesce processes, rather than adding software that tacks another step onto a workflow for users.

Eliminating the need to print paper is a huge boon for local governments and an important metric to show your community as you demonstrate your commitment to sustainability. A digital document solution with unlimited eSigning makes signing any document fast, easy, secure and paper-free—whether you need internal or external signatures, or both on the same document.

If accelerating your sustainability goals is a top priority for your business, download our eBook for advice and expert insights for building an impactful strategy and culture.

When your digital document solution enables you to speed up approvals, workflows, signatures and more, you can better serve your community. You’ll improve operational efficiency and streamline document workflows for faster, smoother public services processes. For example, departments that require signature-heavy work such as bereavement can speed up their service to better support funeral directors who work on specific timelines.

As your government evolves and your community grows, your digital document solution must support you through necessary changes. It should accommodate fluctuations in software usage, user numbers and licencing requirements without disrupting daily work.

It’s critical for local governments and your digital document solution provider to prioritise security and compliance. Look for strong encryption capabilities, audit trails and compliance with industry standards and regulations.

Many document solutions don’t include analytics to help you make data-driven decisions. As a Nitro customer, you get real-time insights and reporting at your fingertips including feature usage, productivity scoring, ROI calculations and sustainability tracking. We include all these insights to help IT teams clearly demonstrate the value of your Nitro investment to stakeholders.

Nitro was founded in Australia and we are deeply familiar with the challenges facing local governments in the region. We’ve designed our digital document solution to meet the unique needs of the Australian public sector, so local governments can serve their communities with efficient document workflows.

Nitro Pro Business, which includes our PDF editor, unlimited eSigning and analytics, enables government entities to eliminate the frustration and costs associated with licence caps. We help you optimise your licence costs while supporting scalability as you grow.

Additionally, Nitro Pro Business supports the sustainability, security and cost-cutting goals of government IT departments—all while integrating seamlessly with your existing infrastructure. We believe the public sector should be able to digitally transform at the same rate as the private sector, so we designed our digital document solution to be easy to onboard, adopt, use and track.

Advanced PDF editing: With a single, secure platform, government entities create, edit, convert, combine and sign PDF documents in one place. When managing high volumes of internal documents and policies, as well as contracts with external parties, Nitro enables government staff to streamline all document-related tasks.

Secure eSigning: Our high-trust eSigning solution enables anyone in a document workflow to securely sign digital files with legally binding and compliant signatures, and send documents to multiple parties for signature in seconds.

Real-time insights: Using Nitro’s analytics, government agencies gain insight and full visibility into workflows and usage to maximise the software and see the greatest ROI possible.

When Shoalhaven City Council in New South Wales, Australia needed a cost-effective PDF solution that gave them more software licencing freedom, they turned to Nitro.

In a recent interview, Dane Hamilton, CIO of Shoalhaven City Council, admitted that the change did concern him and his IT staff.

“We anticipated that it would be challenging to get our staff onboard — particularly because much of the senior administrative work involved combinations of PDFs for agendas, minute taking, etc. But we were really happy with the support provided by Nitro.”

The Council’s IT Infrastructure and Service Delivery Manager Dan Jones added,

“Our transition to Nitro has been a success story. Nitro assisted us with implementation and a communications plan. Ongoing training and support for user adoption really enabled us to deliver on the plan…Nitro also provided a self-service learning portal with how-to guides that makes it easy to improve adoption.”

Since switching to Nitro from Adobe, Shoalhaven City Council achieved a 364% increase in productivity by empowering teams with the right digital document tools for their needs.

If you’re curious to learn how Nitro will accelerate your digital transformation under budget, check out our eBook Beyond Transformation: Digital Evolution in 3 Simple Steps.

All these benefits sound great, but not if they come with the high cost of disrupting your daily work to move to a new digital document system. Technology is only one part of your digital transformation. Your long-term success depends on the partner you choose to make sure the transition, deployment and adoption is seamless.

Nitro’s implementation and migration experts have developed a proven methodology to ensure our customers can make a quick and easy switch to our PDF, eSign and Analytics platform:

Smooth onboarding and rollout: We discuss your business needs and goals, and we provide deployment and technical support, change management consulting, a tailored onboarding plan and more.

Ongoing user training: Our suite of online resources enables your team to gain confidence as they adopt Nitro—using self-help tools, webinars and our user community forum.

White-glove support: Our customer care team has consistently received a 95% Customer Satisfaction score and an NPS score of 68, which is 20% higher than the average for the technology sector.

ROI analytics: Once you’re set up with Nitro, we give you usage analytics to track engagement, calculators to measure ROI and other tools to unlock productivity.

Learn more about Nitro’s Four Pillars to Success in our Switching PDF Vendors Guide.

Take it from the City of Vincent. The city’s council, based in metropolitan Perth, Western Australia, supports a range of local government services with a small IT team. The city had made the move to Adobe Acrobat® Pro for PDF creation and editing but found that its complicated licencing process and high costs were hindering its productivity and hurting its budget.

The council switched to Nitro, and our teams worked closely with them to ensure the city could see the value of Nitro Pro Business to support its goals. Our lower price point and flexible licencing arrangement meant the City of Vincent now empowers 500% more employees with cost-effective document productivity tools.

The bottom line is there is no reason for local governments to break the budget over document software or be limited by licencing caps. Download our eBook Beyond Transformation: Digital Evolution in 3 Simple Steps to see how easy it is to modernise your document processes while consolidating your investments, improving productivity and ensuring security.

We’d love to learn about your organisation’s goals and to share more about our Deferred Start Program for Nitro Pro Business. This program gives Australian government agencies an opportunity for up to 12 months of our PDF, eSign and analytics solutions subscription-free.

Get in touch with our government experts today to learn more.