The democratization of IT is about giving people greater power to build their own apps. In this article, we uncover how digital documents help with that ambition.
Calls to democratize IT need to be somewhat qualified. Does the man in the street harbor a desperate desire to build software applications? Perhaps, perhaps not. The audience of people that want to access simpler tools to build software applications, one could argue, falls into three categories:
People who want to make money from creating a business around software application development.
People who want to make a living from being capable of developing applications.
People who want to work with and use information and need some form of tooling in order to achieve it.
While nobody would wish to put off anyone from having a stab at building a software application, one might question whether that presupposes that everyone that starts playing around with applications development tools is passionate about software development.
For many, it is the last straw, the means to an end. In a digital world, the number of people frustrated by the lack of useful tools to work with information is spiraling ever upwards. So far as most would understand, software applications development is the only answer.
The lobbyists for democratization of IT
Arguably the call for further democratization of IT comes from knowledge workers who see a shortfall in the quality and completeness of tooling they are supplied with to do what they will with information. They want to make more sense of data, leverage its value in more ways, streamline how processes are performed, tasks completed, and share data in ways that bring more value to their customers and stakeholders.
IT leaders aren’t generally attributed as the leaders of the charge towards the democratization of IT, but it would be unfair to say many don’t agree that there is a need to cascade digital tooling further across the enterprise, to equip information workers with better ways to serve themselves.
Balancing business needs with IT practicality
No question, digital transformation demands call for technologies like robotic process automation (software bots) and artificial intelligence to be delivered into the business in a more fine-grained, task-specific form. Many digital leaders accept the way to do this is to find a better balance between professional tools and information tools; to share the load in a way that represents a win: win for both sides.
Composable IT, the emerging game-changer for digital transformations
When it comes to enterprise digital transformations, the new kid on the block is composability tooling and models. Businesses know they need to be able to see market changes as an opportunity, not a threat. That means installing more fluidity into supply chains, resourcing approaches, business processes, and, most importantly, how IT is served up to information workers.
It was Gartner who first coined the term ‘composability’ (composable applications come #5 in Gartner’s top 2022 priorities.).
Gartner describes business composability as ‘…a strategy and capability to apply modularity to any business asset — people, processes, technologies, and even physical assets — so that leaders can quickly, easily, and safely recompose them and create new value in response to disruption.’
Composability is about creating information management solutions built from business-centric modular components, that make it easier to use and reuse data and code, accelerating the time to market for new information solutions while releasing enterprise value.
Read that another way, and composability is about the IT department democratizing IT by serving up the building blocks of new ways to work with information management in ways that is safe for data but offers information workers the autonomy of use that lets them get on with their jobs.
Documents are a familiar concept to almost every human on the planet. In this article, we describe why that fact matters so much when powering digital transformation.
Documents and business
Documents have found a use in enterprise since the very first business. Whether employed as contracts, brochures, or invoices, every aspect of business existence was once punctuated by the presence of documents.
To a large degree, documents have lost their criticality for business, phased out by automation and the move to digital. They have moved to the margins of business. Even the very devices used to print them have worked their way progressively into the corners of the office, no longer manning every desk like faithful watchdogs, but confined to the places where water-coolers and noticeboards hang out.
Thankfully, for fans of the trusty document, our familiar friend is making a comeback. It’s been reinvented and promises now to be the savour of digital transformation initiatives.
What documents do is important
Documents perform a number of roles that haven’t gone away. They are unique as a hybrid information management format. They are a communicator, persuader, reporter, data transport, data record, and process enabler.
Those services in the business world haven’t changed, but the instruments used to achieve them are now largely digital. Evolution stands to make the document extinct in the workplace. Or is it?
How documents are evolving
Consider the evolution of any spoken language and you realize that no language stays the same for ever. Words get inherited from one language into another. The meaning of words change. The structure of sentences evolve. Document formats are like that. They change according to the era.
One of the most valuable aspects of documents lies in the fact people are familiar with them
People instantly get what you’re talking about when you mention documents conceptually in a business context. That isn’t true of other broad technology concepts like cloud computing, big data, the Internet of Things, the metaverse, digital transformation, and so on.
This is why technologists keep returning to them as an approach to managing and sharing information. Their legacy in our memories holds value to innovators because its a great jump-off point into something new. This, at a time when so many new technologies appear abstract to the common man.
Digital documents
The latest innovation in the world of documents is the Canvas Document Format, or CVS. While digitized document forms, like Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) have gone before, true digital documents are smart. Along with data, and design meta-data, they hold logic.
Nevertheless, even in their digital form, they remain very familiar to business people who like the autonomy of documents. Unlike software applications, digital documents can be used without calling on IT professionals to get involved. This means information workers are afforded more useful ways to create information solutions to communicate, persuade, analyze, report, record, automate and collaborate.
Digital documents can be employed by IT professionals and non-coders thanks to their use of no-code drag and drop interfaces. When in the hands of experienced IT professionals, features can be unlocked to further extend to capabilities of the CDF format.
Examples might include:
For information workers
Publishing a rich media brochure or eBook to a website containing elements like video and animated graphics and charts, with embedded visitor tracking analytics to know what visitors found interesting.
Producing distance learning content able to track who has been trained.
Creating data capture and processing apps to automate spreadsheet apps
To harvest and present data in charts, reports, maps and dashboards
For IT professionals
To embed new digital technologies into business processes—and remove the human-in-the-loop—by bringing digital technologies to the edge of the enterprise.
To create reporting systems, customer data platforms and data landscapes to power data-driven business.
To displace Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications with custom information management solutions
Things about digital documents users will find familiar
There are definitely lots of parallels between analog, digitized and smart digital documents.
It begins with the simple things, like formatting. You can view digital documents in familiar page sizes like A4. You can also structure digital documents into sections or chapters.
Digital documents are composed in a no-code environment, so there’s no need to be a coder.
Growing IT governance and control
In a digital age, it’s not sensible to unleash untrained people on the creation of new applications. Even if it were, it probably makes sense for executives and information workers to concentrate on their day jobs rather than attempting to solve to world’s problems with self-authored applications.
IT leaders know, there have to be a new balance between IT and the business, if organizations are going to inherit the agile characteristics demanded of a digital business. With fast changing markets, any realignment of business models, resources, customer demand, etc. have to be seen as opportunities to stand out, not operational risks. This mindset change—what Gartner describes in its consumability mode—is the holy grail of digital transformation in 2022.
The obvious alternative to hard-to-regulate self-authored applications is the humble digital document. Given that digital documents are tethered to a Digital Cloud Space and Digital Data Fabric, IT architects and administrators can specify the permissions and general context of use of digital documents. They have greater, not lesser, control over data endpoints, data integrations, logic controls, business rules applied to workflows and processes. In addition, they benefit from an extra layer of data security.
Platform version control
The subject of platform version control can encourage a yawn in many people. It’s a dry topic. But for IT teams responsible for managing the relationship between enterprise applications and deployed apps, it matters. It can easily become a drain on resources. Even in the early days of Encanvas, any customer request to modify the features of ageing deployments required a technician to dust off an old archived version of the platform, to then upload it on to a PC before any changes to the customer deployed app could be implemented.
Encanvas digital documents offer a clever way to balance the version relationship between the aPaaS platform and the digital documents it operates. The documents themselves contain a versioning feature, so they only inherit new capabilities when upgraded. This means IT engineers can upgrade a platform without asking every digital document operating on it to be upgraded. New features of the aPaaS are only inherited by the digital document when the version of the digital document is upgraded.
Get up to speed on what a digital document architecture looks like and how it works to fuel innovation
What are digital documents?
An intelligent digital document is a semi-autonomous structured data file that contains document content data in addition to design markup and business logic data rules. An example of an intelligent digital document is the canvas document file format from Encanvas (CDF).
Demand for digital document solutions for the enterprise come from demands to serve up better ways of delivering personalised customer experiences, automate back-office processes, and to equip information workers with the data insights they need to make informed decisions. Indeed, with so many demands placed on IT for app development, digital documents equip organizations with the means the push information solutions to the edge of the enterprise.
Leveraging digital innovations
Artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain, virtual reality, the Internet of Things…. there are so many digital innovations available for companies to use, one of the hefty challenges IT teams face is how to embed these innovations into their business processes.
Thankfully, digital documents offer smart ways of painlessly integrating third-party apps and data sources (check-out HyperDrive), making them an ideal delivery vehicle to embed fine-grained solutions to the parts of the enterprise applications developments struggle to reach.
What makes digital documents special?
Digital documents differ from apps because they not only offer a high level of autonomy in the way they are designed, published and used, but are also managed using codeless tools, so Information Workers can produce them—at least in their most basic forms.
That said, there is no real upper limit to the possibilities of using digital documents to augment sophisticated data processing and analytical systems. In truth, when digital documents work together as composite solutions, there’s not much difference between digital documents and apps.
Indeed, digital document solutions have been used to manage roadwork plans across Greater London and operate traffic information systems across one of the largest regional conurbations of the UK!
The architecture of modern enterprise digital document platforms
There are three layers to the digital document architecture cake and these are explained below.
Tier 1 – Digital Document Canvas (CDF)
Documents have become much smarter than they used to be. Whilst new digital document formats perform roles similar to their analog counterparts, they are equipped with logic that makes them more useful for digital data communications, data processing and analysis.
One of the newer roles that digital documents perform is what Gartner calls Hyperautomation, a business-driven approach to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. Digital documents are used to rapidly cascade innovation at lower cost, with improved targeting.
Digital documents are a form of what Gartner calls a composable application. (Interestingly, composable applications comes #5 in Gartner’s top 2022 priorities.)
They are built from business-centric modular components, and make it easier to use and reuse data and code, accelerating the time to market for new information solutions and releasing enterprise value.
One thing that defines documents in many respects is their ability to be used in an autonomous way and this is a quality that CDF files offer. You can design and publish a CDF file as a simple URL, or join files together to create websites and complex data processing and analysis solutions.
That said, digital documents exist within a technology framework managed by IT. The first layer of this is our next subject.
According to Gartner, a data fabric is the No.1 enterprise tech trend for 2022. They argue—‘a data fabric provides a flexible, resilient integration of data sources across platforms and business users, making data available everywhere it’s needed regardless where the data lives.’
Providers like Encanvas offer a Digital Data Fabric for its digital documents to operate within. This digital layer is governed by IT, and serves up data from repositories and apps across and beyond the enterprise in a consumable format. Another useful feature of digital fabrics is they improve data re-use by imposing Master Data Management (MDM) rules on the use of common data tables and resources (like user identity tables). It also monitors the data source pipelines as a passive observer at first and starts suggesting alternatives that are far more productive, or that offer better quality results thanks to embedded AI technology.
Read article on the role of Digital Data Fabrics to support composability
Tier 3 – Digital Cloud Spaces
Another aspect of digital documents that differs them from their analog predecessors is the fact the are built on cloud native technology. This means the underpinning technology exists wholly on the cloud.
The Digital Data Fabric data governance layer of the enterprise cake (see above) operates within digital cloud spaces (sometimes described by IT professionals as ‘cloud container technology’). The role of the cloud spaces is to simplify governance, cybersecurity, scaling, replication and administration of the deployed digital data fabrics that serve digital documents.
This means thousands of digital documents can reside within a single digital data fabric, and ten or more fabrics can coexist within a cloud space. Even the cloud spaces themselves can multiply into large numbers on the same cloud native platform.
This three-tier architecture offers unparalleled opportunities to cascade digital solutions to the far flung reaches of the enterprise while allowing IT to stay in control of the information architecture.
Deliver small and wide data with digital documents
Gartner Says 70% of Organizations Will Shift Their Focus From Big to Small and Wide Data
Written by Ian C. Tomlin | 16th December 2023
Gartner is speaking about small and wide data but what do they mean? Read this article to get up-to-speed on how businesses are re-thinking their consumption of business data to create data-driven decisions with solutions like Encanvas’ digital documents.
Dashboards Aren’t Good For Business
A dashboard is a human interface that helps humans to understand data. At one time, the use of dashboards was all the rage in business. But not so much today.
Every dashboard requires a human to power it which costs time and money.
Dashboards have traditionally been designed for back-office users to make sense of data, interpret it, to then send out reports and make decisions. That doesn’t make sense either. Better instead to have automated, conversational, mobile, and dynamically generated insights customized to a user’s needs and delivered to their point of consumption. That way, data becomes actionable and reaches the people best placed to lever its value.
That’s where digital documents come in.
How digital documents create ‘small and wide’ data analytics
In this era of digital transformation, big data and composable applications, the digital document is king. It means that individual analytical experiences can be created at scale, and speed. The way Gartner describes this is is ‘small and wide’ data analytics
“Small and wide data, as opposed to big data, solves several problems for organizations dealing with increasingly complex questions on AI and challenges with scarce data use cases. Wide data — leveraging “X analytics” techniques — enables the analysis and synergy of a variety of small and varied (wide), unstructured and structured data sources to enhance contextual awareness and decisions. Small data, as the name implies, can use data models that require less data but still offer useful insights.”—Gartner
How digital documents create ‘small and wide’ data analytics
Digital documents take analytics to the edge. Today, more data analytics technologies live outside of the traditional data center and cloud environments. This move from centralized data processing and analytics to edge technologies, like digital documents, reduces or eliminates latency for data-centric solutions and enables more real-time value.
Preparing data — the crucial role of data fabrics
Anyone that’s been involved in data analytics and producing dashboards and reports knows that getting the right data, at the right quality, and at the right time is the biggest challenge. Once these challenges have been overcome, presenting data these days is pretty straightforward. But getting the data stuff right is tremendously time-consuming and, unless automation are involved, they can mean late night for someone with a spreadsheet. Thankfully, data fabrics underpin digital documents to establish a higher standard of data accessibility, integrity and quality. Rather than performing the heavy lifting of integration, extract, transform and load functions, digital documents only need to concentrate on shaping the end product, maybe a little blending of data from different tables and making it pretty—not much more.
Moving from dashboards to answers
In an era of artificial intelligence and machine-to-machine workflows, it doesn’t make much sense to build dashboards for people to look at when all they need is to know when change happens. Advanced digital document analytical solutions work with software bots (in the data fabric) to automate data alerts highlighting to humans when they need to examine data, rather than asking them to look at dashboards that yield limited value.
Answering new questions
One reason centralized data analytics fails lies in the fact that information workers these days are constantly curious, repeatedly asking new questions of data. Serving up all these queries in the form of dashboards and charts is an impossible task. The solution is to give information workers their own codeless tools to examine data and answer their own questions, while serving up high quality insights.
The only minor challenge is getting the balance right in this equation; I.e., ensuring information workers know enough about the data they’re looking at to appreciate its context of use. For example, when invoices aren’t billed until the end of the month, the only time during a month that some financial records will present a complete picture for decision makers is the minute after the last record is reconciled. Combining a digital data fabric with a composable solution like digital documents gives IT professionals the best possible opportunity to get this balance right for stakeholders.
The ambition of many business leaders in the digital age is to create a team of people in a business that are constantly curious, constantly questioning the norm and working out the difference of doing better things over doing things better.
Forging this new style of enterprise demands that information workers are given the tools to do the job. Access to information and information systems is key to this. But to democratize and de-skill IT comes with risks. Setting the right balance between IT and the business is the rump issue. Adopting a cloud native digital platform that offers a composable solution for information consumption, underpinned by a data fabric, may be a good way to achieve the results you seek.
Digital business is driven by data. This article investigates how are digital documents transforming accessibility to the insights executives and information workers need?
Digital business has ramped up the need to insights
If you’re as old as I am you might remember the era of green sheet reports from the data center. Then, we went through a period of Harvard Graphics reports that did away with slides. Business intelligence promised to change everything, but was so slow and costly to roll-out that few implementations delivered on their promises. Then came the cloud and big data.
Even now, after decades of trying to get corporate reporting more useful, there is a huge gap between the centralized data analytics platforms that serve up insights, and the needs of decision makers and information workers.
Do you know what characteristics go into making a top 10 customer? How much profit you make by customer? A typical deal?
The nature of a digital age is that, behind every question is a curious mind with another new question. And the data needs to be fed in real time. Some systems track user behaviors while data is in transit, simply because decision makers trying to grow their businesses don’t have time to wait.
There are some truly excellent business intelligence tools on the market today. Each comes with its own blend of swishy 3D charts, smooth transitions and visualization tools.
For most people, the idea of being able to harness actionable data insights incentivises them to become a citizen developer and start experimenting with these tools to self-serve some results.
However, few people want to invest chunks of their week to perform reporting tasks if it could be done otherwise. Digital documents offer a simpler way to find answers to new questions, without having to become an expert in BI.
The role of a data fabric is key to data value
One of the features of a digital document architecture that makes it so valuable comes in the form of the digital data fabric this architecture resides on.
This is an umbrella of data harvesting, transformation and automation tooling—powered by software bots and AI—that brings data together from its various locations and re-blends it together so that digital document users can compose new solutions with it.
The data mashup capabilities of the digital document come into their own, once IT administrators have setup this powerful capability to forge a single view of data from across the enterprise.
Autonomy of digital documents is key to distributed insights
And this is where digital documents come in. Using digital documents, people enjoy the autonomy to harvest the actionable insights they need quickly, because the data fabric they reside on has already prepared data into a composable form.
There is no need to spend half a day designing a dashboard and the other half cleansing data to make it useful. Additionally, use of HyperDrive and it’s remarkable ability to consume any third-party data, DLL, COM+ object, or C# code without scripting means that business analysts can assist employees by filling any shortcomings in desktop features by adding tooling as needed.
Rapid-application development (RAD) is a term used to describe any form of adaptive approach that speeds up the process of creating and deploying software applications.
Every digital business is driven by data. How are digital documents transforming accessibility to the insights executives and information workers need? We investigate.
