To meet the challenges of the future, the USPTO has developed an ambitious strategic agenda to help position the agency to operate more successfully and efficiently. An important component of the USPTO agenda is leveraging information technology to enable the USPTO to maintain current business production, meet legislative and legal requirements, improve and enhance the current business through electronic commerce, and add new capability to achieve the future electronic workplace. This results in optimizing the processing of patents and trademarks, elimination of paper-based processing, enhancing the quality of products and services and evolution of the businesses to electronic commerce.