The desire of most digital businesses is to make informed decisions driven by rich data analytics. In this article, we explore how digital documents are helping to achieve that.
Business challenges that drive change
Tonis Haamer is one of the cleverest businesspeople I know. He runs a Overall Eesti, technology business in Estonia along with his brother, Mart. Still today, a big part of the business is office equipment, the company’s heritage. But the market for office printing is not what it was, and this caused Tonis to realize that the onward growth of the business demanded a rethink in how it is resourced.
Now, Overall Eesti is a very people-centric business. The team behind the brand is extremely hard working, extremely loyal. Shedding staff wasn’t a desirable go-forward plan. For this reason, Overall Eesti began its journey to become data driven, and one of the most advanced digital businesses.
What it means to be data driven
I had the opportunity to interview Tonis on behalf of Canon Europe when I was running strategy around software solutions for the brand. I was looking to see how companies are adopting data insights, and Overall Eesti was an example.
Over a couple days, Tonis explained the objective behind the company’s data driven agenda was to make smarter decisions more often to answer new questions as they emerged, and to reinforce sub-optimal processes with new applications built using digital documents when it became obvious there was an opportunity to streamline.
Tonis explains, “To be data driven means being able to answer new strategic questions as they emerge. To do that means you have to harness your operational data that comes from ERP, service, CRM, HR, and other front-line business systems. It demands the ability to re-use this data for new purposes. And the challenge that brings with it is how to get the quality and integrity right. Once you’ve achieved that, the possibilities open up. But it is not a trivial task to create composable data.”
Data fabric
Almost a decade ago, Overall Eesti became one of the first companies in the world to create a home-grown Digital Data Fabric they called ‘CLIO.’
As Tonis explains, “Preparing your data is one of the biggest technical challenges of creating a data driven approach to business. It’s not just about harvesting the data you already have. Almost inevitably there will need to be enrichment of data, and you suddenly realize how poor the quality of data is from systems that only use aspects of the databases designed to support their operation. Furthermore, we found that some of the key links between data-sets did not exist. We had to find ways of connecting records in one system with the next by using fuzzy logic matching to construct the relational ties that were missing.”
Data is a big challenge, but it’s not the only one
As an early adopter of data fabric technology, the Overall management team are very familiar with the journey to overcome technical challenges, but Tonis is clear that data quality is only a foundational stone of a broader change agenda.
It starts with rewiring the culture of management towards the importance and use of data. This, and understanding what the strategic priorities are and what questions remain unanswered. You need these three qualities: clarity of purpose, data culture, and data integrity all in place before you start to see returns for your investment. For many businesses, the cost and complexity of that change has discouraged them from moving forward.
Final thoughts
Digital documents, and the data fabric they reside on, offers the necessary blend of tooling for organizations to become data driven. These technology instruments are important, but—as this case example implies—overcoming the cultural, behavioral and strategic planning challenges may still yet be the greater obstacle to success for business leaders prepared to give the data driven business model a try.
New intelligent digital document formats like Encanvas CDF are set to transform the citizen developer landscape. Find out how.
The long tail of demand for apps
Back in 2021, Gartner projected the worldwide low-code development technologies market is projected to total $13.8 billion in 2021, an increase of 22.6% from 2020, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. Check out the valuations of players in this space, and you soon realize citizen development has boomed.
ServiceNow (Public – Nasdaq) Valuation at IPO $2.2B
Mendix Siemens, the giant German technology company, acquired the Mendix low-code application development platform for €0.6 billion (or about $700 million)
Betty Blocks, a leading enterprise no-code application development platform raised $33 in 2021 and has annual revenue sof $29.3M and 184 employees.
OutSystems In 2021 secured $150 millions worth of its own shares at a $9.5 billion valuation, OutSystems parted ways with around 1.6% of itself in the deal.
Appian (Public – Nasdaq) has a market cap in 2021 of $4.64 billion
With all this money floating around, you would think citizen development is the way to go. Low-Code and No-Code applications development has certainly moved forward in the last decade. Even players like Microsoft, Salesforce.com and Oracle boast low-code appdev tools in their offerings these days. The drive for these apps comes from an unrelenting demand for new apps from business leaders and digital workers.
Demand for applications development has spiked thanks to the emerging demands of digital business. Nowadays, it’s not just a question of running a few back-office systems of record to keep the lights on in the business.
IT teams are faced with having to produce custom apps for customers, custom apps for departmental leaders hungry for data insights, custom apps for digital workers fed up with crunching data on spreadsheets or using hard-copy documents to make back-office processes work.
Most business people wouldn’t chose to be citizen developers if they had a choice
There is not just one market for low-code and no-code citizen development tools, there are several. Many aspiring entrepreneurs are looking to create their own custom software apps to serve new digital business models. Equally, there is a large audience of seasoned IT professionals out there, looking for simpler, faster, smarter ways of producing applications. Perhaps though, the largest target audience for citizen development comes from enterprise department managers who are chocked off with IT constantly telling them they can’t have new software tools to automate their processes, displace tedious tasks with robots, or useful business analysis tools to serve up the data insights they need.
Finding a way to source the digital tooling they need to get their job done in a digital business has driven many a business professional to serve themselves with a custom app. Although, my experience of this community is that the overriding majority never had a craving in their life to become a software developer.
What digital workers want are the tools to get their job done in a digital age. And—with the evolution of digital documents—there’s no need to stress out the IT team, or put data at risk to achieve that.
Composability is the way to go
According to Gartner, the latest trends in enterprise IT focus on the need of organizations to adopt ‘composability’ in their enterprise software architectures and business cultures.
Gartner defines business composability as “the mindset, technologies, and set of operating capabilities that enable organizations to innovate and adapt quickly to changing business needs.
A key construct of a composability architecture is what they describe as a data fabric: “..a design concept that serves as an integrated layer (fabric) of data and connecting processes. A data fabric utilizes continuous analytics over existing, discoverable and inferenced metadata assets to support the design, deployment and utilization of integrated and reusable data across all environments, including hybrid and multi-cloud platforms. Data fabric leverages both human and machine capabilities to access data in place or support its consolidation where appropriate.”
It’s not often I agree with Gartner. We’ve had a few fall outs over the years. Generally, this has happened when they’ve suggested an enterprise IT market is going to grow like topsy only to turn out to be a damp squib. Nevertheless, on this occasion, I do agree with Gartner.
If digital businesses are to make data useful—composable—it has to be prepared for consumption, and that means building out the data harvesting, sorting, connecting, organizing, de-duping, transforming, mashing, etc. digital data fabric first before it can be used.
Digital documents
Digital document architectures for the enterprise contain three layers:
#1 Digital Documents
Designed to equip digital workers to get their jobs done in a digital age, digital documents are a new codeless technology construct.
A digital document is an intelligent composite data file that performs the familiar duties of traditional hard-copy documents in the enterprise. Digital workers use them to capture, manage, analyze and communicate with data.
Unlike DIGITIZED document formats like Portable Data Format (PDF) from Adobe, the DIGITAL Canvas Document Format (CDF) from Encanvas brings together all the elements of digital documents—data, user interface (UX) design, if/then logic, presentation and transition rules, design elements, governance (including management, distribution, ownership and archival rules, etc.)—in a simple intuitive format that’s easy to learn and use. Furthermore, canvases can be used in an autonomous mode as standalone documents (which is empowering for digital workers), or interpolated together to fulfil complex information processing functions across and beyond your business. Put digital documents in the hands of digital workers and they can get their work done. Place them in the hands of IT professionals, and you can build practically anything without coding.
Digital documents are key to helping IT teams rollout digital innovation to the edge of their enterprise. For example, composing new AI and software bot powered digital documents creates smarter, more responsible, scalable AI. This enables better learning algorithms, interpretable systems and shorter time to value promoting productivity and agility.
#2 Digital Data Fabric
A data fabric that takes care of the complex data integration, cybersecurity, management, governance and processing tasks that are needed to install robust enterprise-grade IT solutions. Our digital data fabrics maximize data value by simplifying integration challenges and reinforcing Master Data Management (MDM) rules; reducing the replication of data assets, minimizing data complexity, and speeding up time-to-market of new digital document applications.
#3 Digital Cloud Spaces (aPaaS)
The safest way to control digital documents used in the enterprise is to manage published content in data safe containers, protected by rigorous information security policies. Digital Cloud Spaces are, in essence, private cloud containers offering unprecedented cybersecurity, governance and scaling capabilities. Using Digital Cloud Spaces, Digital Data Fabrics coexist on the same private cloud and easily managed and replicated. All of the functionality you would expect in a modern private cloud application Platform-as-a-Service—including the app configuration and governance tooling—comes as part of this cloud native technology componentry.
Digital document architectures correct the balance between IT and the business
The major reason why digital documents are promoted by CIOs and CTOs comes from their ability to set a suitable balance between self-serving digital workers and the IT governance and data security teams found in the IT department. With digital document architectures, IT professionals are always in control of system and data architectures, data endpoints, integrations, etc. They have more visibility over user behaviors and the end products fashioned by digital workers. They can step in when they’re needed, and step back when they’re not.
Digital documents afford IT teams with seismically higher level of control and governance over enterprise systems, data and security when compared to citizen app development solutions.
Are digital documents a low-code alternative or replacement?
That’s a good question, and not one any person can answer probably at this stage. Certainly, there are advantages of digital documents over low-code solutions—i.e., more autonomy for digital workers, faster adoption times, greater scalability, lower risks and overheads to IT teams, simpler data integrations, more control and governance, lower demands on tech competencies etc.
And, there are very few visible disadvantages to adopting digital documents as a strategy. In short, there is nothing that can’t be achieved using digital document platforms of the technical capabilities low-code solutions do today.
That said, as outlined at the start of this article, there is no single market for low-code tools: Unquestionably, entrepreneurs looking to create custom software to kickstart their global business enterprise, will still be better served by finding a low-code software development platform that fits their needs.
