I'm Brendan Hyland. I help regulated facilities transform their software, spreadsheets, workflows and documents from time-consuming, deviation-invoking, regulatory burdens, to the competitive advantage they were meant to be. Join me every weekday as we take a few minutes to explore, design, test and improve the critical systems we use in our facilities.
Document and Signing Workflows
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Ever since COVID, document and signing workflows have been incorporated into everything. Dropbox has it. Microsoft Teams has it. Google Workspaces has it. If you need e-signatures, you probably have access to Docusign, Adobe, Hellosign, and so on. But what exactly are we talking about when we say "document and signing workflow"? Let's step back. Most document workflows are about moving some work through review, commentary, revision and approval. The old way to do this was to send a document out by email, receive 4 copies back, try to incorporate the comments and changes (or, more often, start incorporating the first set, give up half way and ignore the rest) and send it back out again. Repeat a few times before being printed, signed and scanned for approval: A modern document workflow basically works the same way, except without all the spaghetti. The routing, versions and comments are controlled from a centralized location, so the main back and forth is notification messages. We can leverage the collaborative features of the document format to record all changes and comments in one central version of the document, while still retaining a history of all changes: The automation part is that the workflow steps are managed by the central server, advancing through depending on how each actor responds to the review / approval request. At the end of the process you get your final document along with and some record of the approval process. This may or may not be accompanied with signatures of some sort. Which brings us to a quote that might have been Benjamin Disraeli, or Mark Twain lying: There are lies, damned lies, and statistics And just as in lies, there are signatures, signatures, and signatures. Until next time, thanks for reading! – Brendan p.s. Enjoy this message? Read more at the Hyland Quality Systems website. |
The Daily HaiQu
I'm Brendan Hyland. I help regulated facilities transform their software, spreadsheets, workflows and documents from time-consuming, deviation-invoking, regulatory burdens, to the competitive advantage they were meant to be. Join me every weekday as we take a few minutes to explore, design, test and improve the critical systems we use in our facilities.
Last time we left off with a cliff-hanger of a question: How do you prove you're you when signing a document? There are several ways I've seen that the 3rd party providers prove that it's you who's signed the document: You clicked a link from an email. You paid for the service with a credit card. You provided some government issued photo ID. Someone, such as a notorized public or your HR department, has verified it's you in person. Obviously these are very different levels of assurance. Then...
Last time we learned about the difference between an electronic signature - basically any way of signing a document electronically - and a digital signature, which is a cryptographic mechanism that can be used to implement electronic signatures, among other things. Modern digital signatures most often use the Public Key Infrastructure, or PKI, to generate and verify keys. So for you to properly e-sign your document (and I'm really simplifying things for illustration here) you need three...
There are several levels of 'signatures' that you can apply to an electronic document. The first and most basic is just an image of your written signature. One common option for this is to print the document, sign and scan it back in again. A more convenient version is to have an image of your signature saved that you can paste into documents. This is what many free versions of pdf software and word processors offer as a basic document signing option - a 'stamp' of your saved signature image....