This is a huge cost, but it’s also a tremendous opportunity. As our research shows, time wasted on unproductive tasks adds up to a 21.3% hit on the organization’s overall productivity. Addressing the time wasters would be equivalent to adding 213 employees in a 1,000 person organization – employees who could be out selling and supporting customers, designing and building new products, innovating and driving the business forward.

We’ve seen plenty of investment in business process improvement over the past few years, but most of these efforts are aimed at re-engineering or automating business processes that are system-to-system, or system-to-human. Our research findings on information worker productivity suggest that organizations need to place similar emphasis on improving individual productivity and human-to-human business processes.

There’s some evidence that executives in many organizations are recognizing the importance of information worker productivity. IDC’s CIO survey research shows productivity is a top priority this year. But where to start?

A surprising finding in our survey is that information workers spend a very large percentage of their time working with documents in one way or another – researching and gathering information for documents, creating, merging edits and comments from multiple reviewers into a single revision, managing the document approval process and obtaining approvals and signatures, and dealing with forms and forms data. As it turns out, quite a bit of this time is spent dealing with a variety of frustrations and challenges. It’s no one single thing – it’s a whole slew of time wasters that fall broadly under personal productivity and collaboration.

We think the challenges working with documents are only increasing as employees increasingly work on the go using smartphones and tablets in addition to their PCs, and collaborate with people outside the organization. And not just for information workers: the growing needs around mobility and external collaboration are also creating new challenges for IT around security and risk management, so we believe the time is now to address document-based productivity issues.

Does your organization have a program underway to improve information worker productivity? If so, what steps are you taking? If not, what’s holding you back?

Read more in the full IDC white paper, here.

Melissa Webster, program vice president, IDC

Follow Melissa Webster on Twitter: mwebster_idc

Acrobat addresses the problems that compromise the productivity of information workers and IT departments.  As CMSWire’s David Roe wrote this week, “The features have been built around actual enterprise needs.” Reporters from InformationWeek, eWeek, TechCrunch and PC World and more also reported on the white paper this week.

You can read the report in full here.

I’ll be moderating a panel at Salesforce Dreamforce this year titled “Its 2012, Shouldn’t You be Contracting Like it Is?” Experts from Groupon, Electronic Arts, SolarCity and Time Warner Cable will share lessons learned and best practices around web contracting, how their companies have increased ROI in Salesforce and turned their businesses into competitive sales machines using Adobe EchoSign.  Here are the details:

Session: “Its 2012, Shouldn’t You be Contracting Like it Is?”

Date/Time: September 18 from 12:30pm – 1:30pm.

Venue: San Francisco Marriott Marquis

Room: Golden Gate A

Panelists: Groupon, Electronic Arts, Solar City and Time Warner Cable

For more updates on EchoSign at Dreamforce 2012, keep an eye on our blog and the Acrobat, EchoSign and Chatter Twitter handles (#df12).

We’ve entered into a new age of doing business in the cloud and web contracting is playing an important role in accelerating this transformation.

Kevin M. Lynch, SVP and GM, Acrobat and Document Services, Adobe

Twitter: @LynchKevinM

The main mission of NISC is to protect the government, but the organization’s other overall mission is to improve the entire security level of Japan. As the first step for protecting electronic documents, NISC implemented PDF as the standard format for electronic documents. “We prefer not to rely upon technology provided by one specific company, but we had no problems supporting the use of PDF files since they are the international standard ISO 32000-1,” says NISC.

NISC believed that the ideal solution would use the existing Japanese Government Public Key Infrastructure (GPKI) for handling certificates. Adobe formed a task force with NISC to work on support for GPKI and publish government official signatures to the Adobe Approved Trust List (AATL). This enables users of Adobe Acrobat X and Reader X to automatically and easily verify the electronic signatures of government officials on PDF files using the GPKI government official certificates.

“Thanks to cooperation from Adobe, we were able to effectively deploy GPKI, which enabled us to increase efficiency without raising costs,” says NISC. “With electronic signatures, we can thwart the intentions of attackers attempting to pull off spoofing attacks.”

Read more about this implementation here:

Akiko Yamamoto, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Acrobat Solutions

Take our Adobe FormsCentral End of Summer Quiz to find out what kind of party suits you the best. Should you host a pool party, or a garden party? Take our quiz to find out.

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Each ad mechanical we produce is a PDF document that moves through our workflow from start to finish. The entire production cycle is documented using Adobe Acrobat.  We time-stamp, log, and track production responsibilities and review cycles. Review cycles go faster as team members no longer have to decipher handwriting and can layer comments together within the file.

All of our print coordinators then run the files associated with an ad through a customized Acrobat preflight process that vets the mechanical for the requirements of hundreds of different publications. Everything is checked in great detail—ink density, dots per inch, missing fonts—you name it.

Our customized workflow is great because it allows us to take advantage of the out-of-the-box functionality of Acrobat   yet combine it with our own in-house production system. It gives us an enterprise-scale solution at low cost of ownership. Our users have more control and our IT professionals worry less about inadvertent errors.

Now, four print coordinators handle the workflow that previously required dozens of people working multiple shifts. We’ve eliminated the use of third-party software for checking final specifications, boosted the degree of quality assurance and predictability, and we’re getting closer to a paperless environment.

The main competitive differentiator for us is this turnkey automated workflow. It delivers highly repeatable, flexible, trusted outcomes that keep our clients happy. It also provides us with a strong sense of confidence and pride about our production services.

Adobe Acrobat brings a Zen approach to our project workflow; managing the job is easier and our employees are more productive.

Bill Lunsford, DBA, Graphics Manager, BBDO

Read the full story here: http://adobe.ly/O8XiSH

Well, wish no more: AcrobatUsers.com now has a FormsCentral template exchange, which allows you to upload your designs and share them with other users at the Acrobat User Community. If you don’t make forms of your own, but want to use someone else’s awesomely awesome forms, you can browse through, download and use FormsCentral templates that others have uploaded, and rate or comment on these templates.

The template exchange is a great way to see what others are doing with FormsCentral and to share your work with the FormsCentral community. Go check it out today to start uploading your templates and browsing those that have been shared by others. If you’re interested in learning how to save your forms as templates, take a look at this FormsCentral video.

-    Rebecca Staley, Marketing Specialist, Acrobat Solutions

Two large government organizations are also taking advantage the ELA and standardizing on Acrobat. The U.S. Air Force has recently selected Acrobat X Professional as its standard, enterprise-wide PDF software. Using the premier PDF solution from Adobe, the Air Force can create higher-quality content while driving tighter collaboration and productivity, greater security and lower costs across the entire organization.

The Air Force cited several factors that led to adopting Adobe Acrobat as its PDF solution, with a three-year enterprise agreement, covering 600,000 seats. In addition to PDF creation capabilities, Adobe Acrobat delivers peace of mind by helping eliminate compatibility and other issues that drain valuable resources. Adobe Acrobat enables better software asset management and improved patch and update processes, which significantly reduces the effort and cost required to keep systems up-to-date.

Another large government agency, which I can’t name, entered into an ELA with Adobe recently, as well. The department consolidated software licenses for the most current versions of Acrobat X as well as LiveCycle Enterprise Suite, and Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Master Collection. They now have a standard PDF solution nationwide.

The ELA enables the department to consolidate more than 400 separate purchase orders into just a handful of annual purchases or renewals. The ELA saves a lot of time and helps to ensure that the latest software is deployed to employees needing it in a timely manner. In addition, the agreement positions the department to secure the lowest, most consistent price for the latest software and technology, creating massive savings year after year.

Using the ELA to deploy PDF solutions across your organization is a smart move and you’d be in good company. Check it out.

Mark Grilli, senior director of Acrobat Solutions product marketing

For less than the price of a cup of coffee or a gallon of gas, you can take full advantage of the service offerings at FormsCentral: create up to 5 forms, accept payments through your form via PayPal, allow for skip logic and email notifications, and all the rest – for a full month. This is the perfect opportunity to get acquainted with the Basic features of FormsCentral, whether you’re a fan of the free version and want to test out a premium feature set or whether you’re new to FormsCentral and just want to see what it can do.

So the next time you’re buying yourself a cup of coffee or browsing the latest releases in iTunes, just think about where else you could put that one dollar bill to use. Check out more on this cool FormsCentral deal.

This offer is good for 30 days until September 22, 2012. Pricing is for one month only.

-       Rebecca Staley, Marketing Specialist, Acrobat Solutions

The implications of this are enormous. Leaked sensitive information damages your competitive advantage and erodes your customers’ and partners’ trust in you. And that, of course, hits the bottom line. IT departments can choose a user-friendly, document-level security solution to protect the company’s documents, inside and outside the firewall. For their part, users need the ability to secure documents with a solution that can easily integrate into the existing IT environment. That way, everybody’s happy.

Adobe Acrobat customers deal with document-level security risks all day long. We all remember the embarrassing high profile cases in which law firms or government agencies thought they’d deleted sensitive content only to find it on the front page of the NYTimes. However, using Acrobat, Andrew Moir, a partner at international law firm Herbert Smith, says “we know that information we need to keep confidential, stays confidential.”

Adobe Acrobat lets you remove sensitive data from documents before sharing them with others. The PDF redaction tools permanently delete confidential information, while sanitization tools remove hidden information with one click. Acrobat’s Guided actions also help ensure that all team members prepare documents for distribution correctly and consistently.

You can further mitigate the risk of sensitive information being leaked by controlling access to documents. “We need to control who accesses documents and give people the assurance that the materials they receive have not been altered,” says Margaret M. DiBianca, Associate, Young Conaway Stargatt & Taylor

Young Conaway uses Acrobat to password-protect those documents with Acrobat’s 256-bit AES encryption technology to control access. The firm also sets file permissions to prevent editing, printing, or copying content. “With Acrobat, we can put controls on PDF files to limit access to information and restrict copying of data from files,” DiBianca adds. Acrobat also works with Adobe LiveCycle® Rights Management ES2 for extended rights management protection.

It’s also important to understand the role eSignatures play in security. Without an assurance that someone’s signature is the real deal, business could come to a screeching halt. That was one reason Adobe acquired EchoSign last year. With Adobe EchoSign eSignature and Web contracting services, you can send and receive digitally signed documents securely and quickly. EchoSign has been designed from the ground up for state-of-the-art ASP security. Electronic signatures are also protected by the federal ESIGN Act, which ensures that customers who sign contracts electronically are as protected as they would be had they opted for pen-on-paper agreements. You could argue the protections are even greater with digital contracts, since eSignature solutions can offer additional authentications from email, IP addresses, passwords, social network credentials and other safeguards that surpass anything possible with physical copies or fax transmissions.

What’s happening now is that Web contracting, which includes the automation of the entire contract process — from creation, collaboration, and execution to archiving and management — is quickly replacing the painful paper-based processes of the past with the advantages of working on the Web.

The main drivers of Web contracting and eSignatures are customers, partners, and internal users. Customers are increasingly comfortable conducting business via the Web and mobile devices, and they are demanding that companies move more of their customer-facing processes online. That, of course, adds a new dimension to security considerations.

So whether your security needs are redaction, rights management, access or secure e-signatures, Acrobat can provide a solution. There’s more information at the Acrobat IT Resource Center for insights into how to Acrobat can make your documents — and your IT operation — more secure.

Mark Grilli, senior director of Acrobat Solutions product marketing