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Decoupling Data Benefits for Digital Transformation

Decoupling Data Benefits for Digital Transformation

Jan 12, 2023 | Business Intelligence, Data Management, Digital Data Fabric, Digital Documents, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Software

Decoupling Data 

Benefits for Digital Transformation

Written by Ian C. Tomlin | 12th January 2024

Decoupling data:  What does it mean and why do it?  In this article, we explain the reason why so many CIOs have decoupled data architectures and data fabrics front-of-mind in their 2024 investment plans.

“All I want to know is…”

This is how most business intelligence conversations begin.

An employee or manager who wants to ask something new of their data because they are curious.
It does seem rather remarkable that here we are in 2023, and businesspeople still find themselves unable to answer the most fundamental questions about their customers, business, products, and growth performance.

I began my relationship with business intelligence and organizational change some 3 decades ago. In terms of outcomes, I can’t say it’s moved on much.

The problem of making data consumable for analysis has not gone away

Step into any major corporation and you will find humans employed solely to spend over 80% of their time making best use of spreadsheets to analyze data. Of this work, they are likely to spend at least half of their available time gathering, cleansing, normalizing and preparing data to make it useful FOR analysis.

Think too of the departmental and regional heads that spend over 20% of their time producing and presenting reports to more senior executives who could’ve asked their questions directly of the data, had they the means to do so.

You want your team to be curious, to explore new possibilities, understand market opportunity, customer wants, and separate the wood from the trees. But how do you equip them with the means to ask any question they have on their minds without first relenting to opening up a spreadsheet, entering or pasting data, merging columns, de-duping rows, and all the rest of it?

That’s what this article will answer.

AI bots need good data too!

The need for composable data is not peculiar to the subject of data analysis and business intelligence. For processes to be operated by software, those ‘digital agents’ and software applications must be fed with good data too.

Many of the tech industry headlines in 2022 focused on the growing role of artificial intelligence and its use in business to make decisions, supplement human skills, and to process larger amounts of data in shorter periods of time.

Companies want to bridge between their front-office and back-office with automations and software, not human-in-the-loop, hope for the best resourcing. Creating these automations requires data, data, data.

Is it any wonder why so many worthy digital transformation projects fail at the first hurdle, when the data they need to make decisions and action processes is scattered to the four winds?

Thinking data analyst illustration

Why your data is bundled in the first place

Traditionally, most business-critical enterprise data exists in systems of record, and for mature organizations, legacy systems. This data world was for decades, surrounded reassuringly by the protective sheath of a firewall.

Over the past decade, data supply and consumption have expanded exponentially beyond the enterprise boundary with more stakeholders wanting to share data and gain transparency over their services, more use of SaaS apps (built to service tasks independently of other systems), cloud services, and of social media and marketplace platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, Google, and WhatsApp.

In the end, your data is organized by software programs and services that generate the data. I can get a record of the purchase from Amazon and it will stay there forever. When my blood test is taken, it is stored by the provider of the test.

Every fragment of data gets stored into the system that created it.

The end result? Use over 50 SaaS apps and you end up with 50 unique data silos–organized in proprietary structural arrangements–that probably weren’t made for sharing.

The business need for digital decoupling

Every business today must be data-driven to survive. Digital business is generally always on, and customers want transparency in everything they do. The notion of real-time business is upon us; what Bill Gates called ‘business at the speed of light’.

The watchword in boardrooms is AGILITY; being able to switch on and switch off resources according to demands as they happen. All this presupposes people are making decisions at all levels of the enterprise based on facts, not intuition and gut feel.

Imagine a scene 12-months from today. You are sitting in your office, and you know you can ask Siri any question about your business, in the full expectation she has the data to answer your questions. Whilst the AI powered chatbot interfaces exist to achieve this today, the absence of a decoupled architecture means it won’t happen any time soon in most organizations.

While data is being held for ransom in the silos of third-party software vendors, the ability to ask any question you like remains a pipedream.

The way to solve this is to decouple data from the business systems that create and manage it; to form a departmental or enterprise-wide data fabric layer of pre-gathered, pre-cleansed, and fully composable data. This way, data can remain completely autonomous from systems, and multiple connected services can be then added to serve up data from this ‘clean’ repository as needed.

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The need for a decoupled data architecture

Data value is all about relationships and context.

Take for example a customer record from your CRM system. It means so much more when you can explore the financial data that exists on the same customer, or the service record that exists on your service management meeting. This customer record probably discloses further insights when you see what data exists about this customer on Google, Amazon and Facebook. And, if you can take the mobile phone data from call records and contact centre feeds, more so.

No system in its whole self can uncover all the secrets of the data it holds. To maximize your customer data, financial, data, training data, sales pipeline and performance data… you need to compare it to everything else in its biosphere.

Even when you create a system-specific reporting layer, it’s likely you will want to harvest contextual data from other third-party systems and present views for different stakeholder interest groups in different ways. The report tooling supplied by SaaS vendors is bluntly too primitive to service these needs, understandably because this requirement falls outside the scope of their own systems’ reporting capability.

Surprisingly, you would expect the problem of data integrity and organization only really exists when you look across multiple third-party systems. In fact, many organizations that operate software from THE SAME supplier can equally find their data repositories hold inconsistent data. This is because each operation will implement solutions in different ways.

Equally, the way teams use systems will vary according to local cultures and behavioral norms. This means a system designed in precisely the same format as another might still surface different data results (for instance, one team might use the ‘Customer’ field to identify a customer while another uses a Customer Code).

decoupled data architecture

Relentless departmental reporting requests create demands for multiple connected services to exist as a perpetual state. This is driving IT requirements for an enterprise-wide and autonomous data fabric layer. When ad-hoc solutions are created to serve discrete projects that evolve independently, the cost and risk to the business are amplified exponentially.

Composable data assets

Coined by Gartner, the term “composable enterprise” first appeared in 2021 and is widely used today to describe a modular approach to digital service delivery and software development. In other words, a plug-in-play application architecture whereby the various components can be easily configured and reconfigured.

A key element of this architecture is the separation of the data layer from the application layer, fostering greater re-usability of both.

A successful digital transformation requires decoupling the data layer from legacy IT so that companies aren’t forced to modernize their enterprise resource planning systems all at once—an expensive, time-consuming, and risky proposition. Companies that implement data and digital platforms—separating the data layer from legacy IT—can scale up new digital services faster, while upgrading their core IT. Source BCG

Critical decoupling architecture objectives

Organizations that adopt a data fabric and decoupled architecture will focus on the following priorities, to:

• Liberate data from old, inflexible legacy core systems
• Transfer the ownership of data from IT to the business
• Bring data transparency to create a curious, learn fast/fail fast, data-driven decisioning culture
• Speed time to value of new projects and digital services

Where we are today

Overlooking the obvious problem

In recent years, IT investment decisions have flowed down to departmental leaders who don’t see data quality or provisioning as a priority. Therefore, most organizational IT decision-makers have sought to overlook and avoid the need to invest in a data fabric that offers the ‘ready-to-use’ composable data needed to answer successive new what-if questions and power new systems and automation.

The obvious alternative (for department heads at least) is to employ more roles in data analytics and manually crank out data as and when it is needed.

These point-specific solutions inevitably lead to delays in projects and inefficiencies. Furthermore, every time a new requirement emerges for a different blend of data, it’s unclear whether the data relationships exist to combine data in the desired way.

In consequence, through this fragmentation of IT procurement and decisioning–and in some cases, the absence of a firm central hand to guide technology architectures–firms are supersizing their project risk, living with project delays, slowing their ability to answer new questions, and settling for a ‘business as usual’ cost to manually data crunching.

What a decoupling architecture looks like

There are common technology building blocks to decoupling architecture solutions:

Data harvesting and organization components

  • Infrastructure as a service and cloud-native provisioning to negate the use of poorly utilized in-house server infrastructure.
  • Data Mashups and Software Bots to augment data feed information flows using upload templates, watch folders, scheduled events, etc. to harvest data from existing systems and data sources.
  • Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) tooling, often powered by fuzzy logic and AI, to cleanse, normalize, enrich and organize data.
  • Database systems design and provisioning to create and organize relational and flat file databases to maximize data relationships and reuse.
  • Infrastructure Platform-as-a-Service and codeless data connectors to connect reporting systems to legacy systems and other data sources without having to code an interface.

Application components

  • Application Platform-as-a-Service (aPaaS) – to provision services in support of the design, deployment, and operation of software applications.
  • Application Fabric – A cloud platform to manage the publishing and organization of large numbers of discrete software applications used by digital workers to consume data.
  • Cloud infrastructure services – A cloud platform to administer cloud infrastructural deployments, data security, replication and scaling.
  • Cloud-native clustered deployments of secure private clouds at scale – A cloud platform service used to provision clustered private cloud deployments, thereby removing the need for administrators to log in to successive discrete sessions when supporting multiples of private clouds (something that often happens when businesses operate sales channels and supply chains).

Service delivery components

  • Integration with popular desktop and reporting tools
  • Reporting services to publish dashboards, charts, and reports
  • Information flow design tooling to create email/SMS alerts and notifications
  • Low-code/No-code/Codeless applications design and publishing services (to build apps needed to implement changes to processes resulting from
  • Digital documents to democratize data use and consumption
  • AI chatbot human interfaces, so digital workers can ask questions
two data analysts in the office illustration

Examples of decoupled architecture data use cases

Applications for decoupling span the enterprise, although justifications for projects can originate at a departmental level, as illustrated by the examples below.

Managing growth performance across a sales territory

The sales division of a global electronics company responsible for the Middle Eastern, Eastern Europe and African markets was being hampered by a shortfall in sales insights as the result of its widespread data silos.

This meant the data-gathering process was time and effort intense. Managers were presented with copious data but no actionable insights or recommendations for action.

To resolve it, a data fabric was created across the regional sales platforms and ERP data repositories that could deliver timely actionable insights to stakeholders on demand. Read the full case story.

Creating a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to focus operations toward profitable business

The management team of a progressive Office Equipment and technology business in Europe identified the need to become ‘data-driven. The sales leadership wanted to create a single view of its customers to focus sales efforts on the most profitable opportunities and automate delivery processes.  Read the full case story here

Scanning the market horizon, and matching resources to opportunities

Power and Energy is a fast-changing market. In the professional services industry, becoming adept at surfacing new advisory opportunities–also knowing what advisory services to offer and how to resource them–is critical to success. Find out how one global advisory firm used a decoupling architecture to gain a competitive advantage.

Final thoughts

Overlooking the obvious problem

1. Digital decoupling is a must-have for any business that wants to optimize its ability to be data-driven, foster a culture of curiosity, and answer new questions cost-effectively.

2. The success and time to value of digital transformations–and its substrates like hyper-automation, blockchain markets, customer self-service, etc. have become increasingly dependent on accessibility to a decoupled architecture that makes data composable through a coherent and useful data fabric. Trying to ignore or navigate around the data bundling problem to short-cut on delivery costs almost inevitably results in the reverse.

3. A decoupled architecture is simpler to achieve today thanks to advanced iPaaS/aPaaS codeless platforms like Encanvas that serve up all the necessary building blocks of data ETL, software bots, data mashup, data fabric, app fabric, fuzzy logic matching and bridging, digital document democratization and clustered private-cloud deployment.

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What Are Digital Documents?

What Are Digital Documents?

May 20, 2022 | Digital Data Fabric, Digital Documents, Digital Transformation

What is a Digital Document?

Documents are a useful information management and sharing tool—they’re easy to compose and understand. Their strength lies in their autonomy. Unlike a lot of the tech that’s around these days, documents are something everyone can wrap their heads around—and you don’t have to know about databases or have coding skills to use them.  This is why documents have found a new role and purpose in the digital age. According to the enterprise IT analyst firm Gartner, there are three technology building blocks that every business should be thinking about to transform from a digital laggard into a leader. They are a:

Clustered Cloud Architecture

The latest clustered cloud technology improves the economy, governance, integration, cybersecurity, and scaling of applications. Very much focused on IT departmental needs, Encanvas Digital Cloud Spaces offer businesses the optimal balance between IT economy, IT compliance, and IT agility.  With Encanvas, this is the layer used to provide holistic governance over digital documents, apps and portals.

Composable Data Architecture

This technology data layer spans the enterprise, decoupling data from the various places it resides in, building connections between data silos where they don’t exist today, and making data consumable for consumers.  Digital documents are one of the consumers of the composable data that these systems make available, thereby democratizing data analytics.

Invest in Tools to Encourage Data Reuse

Digital Documents offer your team the tools they need to reuse and present data in more ways, enabling creativity, data storytelling, learning, communications, innovation and digital evolution.

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Digital documents have become the lifeblood of business administration

There are many more asks of the humble document. People work with information differently in a digital business. Demands for greater adaptability in processes, self-service on the front end, and personalization of customer offerings create an environment that’s demanding of good data, consumed in many alternative ways.  It takes information workers with autonomous tooling to bring the level of responsiveness needed to respond to all these expectations. Consider the list of tasks that are being placed on digital documents. Here’s a short list:

Like a Document

The fact that digital documents have the look, feel, autonomy and general purpose of use as traditional hardcopy documents is extremely helpful for IT and digital leaders working to cascade new technology across the enterprise. Traditional documents is a concept already grounded and familiar to us all, unlike interpretative technology terms like cloud computing, big data, or IoT. (Let’s be honest, how many people can get their heads around all these things?!)

Codeless Composition and Publishing

Due to the shortage of IT skills in the global workforce, coding is a skill that comes at a premium. Democratizing information working and removing the demand for coding is something business leaders want to do, but not at the high price of unregulated applications, data management, security risks, or IT architectures spiralling out of control.

Digital documents represent a new balance in the relationship between business and IT, one that benefits both sides of the equation.

Rich and Interactive

Unlike other document forms, digital documents support rich media composition and publishing, enabling you to include video, hotlinks, maps, interactive graphs, and more.

A Great Way to Work with Data

Practically every digital document does ‘something’ with data. That means it’s important to be able to integrate with existing data sources and applications. A Digital Data Fabric becomes an essential partner for digital documents, because it serves up clean data of high quality. But it is for the digital document composition tool to provide the point-and-click interface needed to organize and manage the data assets.

Cloud-Native

Everything today happens on a digital cloud. For your digital documents to enrich customer portals, websites, eCommerce platforms, SaaS apps, and the likes, the technology you build on must be cloud-native. That means it was built on the cloud and uses cloud-native technology components, for example, big data architectures and flat file data structures, in addition to relationship databases.

User Behavioral Tracking

Personally, I find this one of the more valuable features of digital documents. In a data-driven age, every marketer or content producer wants to know how effective their content is. Out of the box, digital documents support rich behavioral tracking, enabling you to learn about your audience and what they care about. It’s highly valuable for marketing and essential in areas like learning management, where tracking course completion is generally a compliance requirement.

Powered by AI

Digital documents include features that allow IT professionals to easily embed plug-ins, data, graphs, maps, bots, and artificial intelligence into documents. This equips IT teams with an effective and easily managed way of cascading new technology to the edge of the enterprise.

Enterprise-grade App Performance

Digital documents are designed to exist within a highly regulated corporate business environment. That means, for example, that each document has a version identifier that allows user-automated upgrades as and when new platform features are added to the digital document ecosystem.

This means there are never any software upgrade costs, and any decisions to upgrade documents to the latest version are made selectively, as and when needed, at the discretion of the document owner.

Always Safe for Data

A series of additional cybersecurity safeguards can be added to digital document platforms over and above the industry standard controls already available from prevalent hosting environments, like Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2, and others.

Mobile Ready

Documents can be published in various formats. Templates make it easy to choose the type of deployment treatment. One of those options is a stylesheet for mobile-first sites, so pages scale according to the form factor of the device used to read it.

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Micro-Portals • Forms • Reports • Training Dashboards • Charts • Maps • Tables Checklists • Onboarding • Risk Registers • Presentations • eBooks

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Digital Versus Digitized Documents

Digital Versus Digitized Documents

May 19, 2022 | Data Management, Digital Data Fabric, Digital Documents

Digital Versus Digitized Documents

How Documents Are Evolving to Support Digital Business

Written by Ian C. Tomlin | 12th January 2024

In this article, we uncover the big divide between old and new document technologies.

Documents, The Lifeblood of Business Administration

For a decade, business people have seen a move away from paper and documents in the office. It’s left many wondering how long businesses like theirs would continue to see multi-functional printers in the corner of the office.  In the past, documents have been the staple diet of business. Companies have consumed reams of paper to automate processes, report, record, share, and generally use information.

For information workers, documents are convenient, easy to use, and offer them a level of autonomy to ‘get things done’ that technology still woefully lacks.  There are certainly sound financial reasons NOT to use paper forms. Printing paper documents can be expensive, especially in full color. The advantages of digitized forms go beyond economies in printing. Not only are digital documents easier for computers to read, they don’t demand physical storage space compared to paper documents. Furthermore, there’s no need to pay a fortune to convert paper forms into a digital format later down the line.

One aspect of the digitized document that has held it back somewhat is the old guard of people familiar with reading, reporting, sharing, and storing paper documents. The adage ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’ applies here. Many die hard printed document users don’t want to change their ways. They don’t like reading electronic documents from a screen.

Best Uses for Digitized Documents

There is a significant difference between a digitized and a digital document.  For most users, a digitized document is nothing more than a document structure with data melded into a file. It is an opportunity to capture, process, sign, view, and save documents in a format that computers understand.  Using Adobe’s proprietary Acrobat software—which isn’t cheap by the way—users can add a bit of interactivity into their digitized documents. Another feature of the full-fat version of PDF is that it allows data to be added to digitized documents in the form of basic fields.

This does make life easier for digital data capture and beats sending someone a Word document to complete. However, it’s not digital transformation by any means.

For marketers, one other stand-out feature of full-fat PDF should also be mentioned; the means to present PDF documents in full-screen mode with a black background. This looks so much cooler than the standard PDF view. Combine PDF with their party tools, like Flipsnack, and you can share electronic documents that work like a paper document with flipping pages (cool!).

New intelligent digital document formats—like CDF— don’t displace the role of their digitized predecessors. PDF will remain useful for signatures, archival, etc. for many years to come. Instead, they answer the new demands being placed on documents for the digital age. Which requires a wholly new digital file construct.

5 Things That Make Digital Documents Useful

New intelligent digital document formats—like CDF— don’t displace the role of their digitized predecessors. PDF will remain useful for signatures, archival, etc. for many years to come. Instead, they answer the new demands being placed on documents for the digital age. Which requires a wholly new digital file construct.

1. Autonomy of use

Like their hardcopy paper and digitized predecessors, this new document format can be used in a relatively autonomous way. That said, they are tethered to the Digital Clustered Cloud Space that manages them, and connected to a Digital Data Fabric that serves up composable data to users, so there’s no need to do quite so much of that tedious data crunching and cleansing work to make harvested data useful. 

The autonomy of use offered by digital documents is good news for information workers because they finally have the means to serve themselves with the information management and publishing tools they need to get their work done without constantly having to go to IT for more apps. It’s good news for IT teams because they can serve the long-tail of demand for apps across the business without having to lose control over enterprise architecture, data organization and data security to a citizen developer free-for-all.

2. Rich media, interactive document publishing

You can do a lot of things with digital documents. For one thing, they support rich media, so if you want to produce an elegant digital brochure for your website, or eBook, the world is your oyster. Once you’ve composed your eBook, to take it online, you can assign a URL, or post your page into an iFrame to embed it into your website. This makes digital documents extremely handy for marketers.  Another great feature of digital documents is that you can track user behaviors to see what content is interesting to your audience. Want to publish your PowerPoint presentation as an interactive document online? Yep, you can do that too!

3. Custom distance learning courseware with tracking

Those responsible for learning management across their enterprise will find digital documents handy too. Not only can you quickly turn PowerPoints into fully standalone interactive courses—complete with assessments, tests, and pre-qualifiers—you can record who has been trained. Connect courses into an eLearning system and you can offer learners the means to return to courses from the point where they left.

4. Mobile and desktop information management ‘apps’

Displacing the need to code, digital documents empower information workers to work with data on their terms, without having to build applications or suffer spreadsheets.

Data is served up in a composable format from a Digital Data Fabric, making it easier to work with—even when it’s been gathered from multiple data sources and systems. Use of no-code drag-and-drop design elements means that documents are easy to compose for business people who don’t have a black belt in computing.

5. Analytics and report publishing

Digital documents support plugins provided by IT teams, so that higher levels of sophistication can be added to the base features information workers use.

One example of how this can be applied comes in the form of interactive graphs, charts and dashboards. Digital documents make it easier to harvest data insights from across a series of data points, to then spin up a one page report for either temporary or permanent use.

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From Digitized to Digital Documents

PDF is arguably the best-known electronic document format. It comes in a variety of forms (notably 1b is the preferred option for digitized document archival), and it’s been around for over twenty years. 

PDF is most commonly used for converting unstructured documents (hard copy) into a digitized form that computers can read. More recently, PDF has seen a greater lease of life thanks to digital signatures.

That means, if you’ve ever scanned a document, you’ve probably used either an unstructured image or a PDF to present and share the information.

Setting The Optimal Balance Between It and The Business

While the notion of making information capture, processing, automation, analytics, and collaboration more accessible to information workers is desirable, the risk faced by IT leaders is to encourage a free-for-all of citizen apps.  This would only result in further complicating the data architecture of the business.   

This is where digital documents can deliver results. They are wedded to a Digital Data Fabric layer that serves up data in a composable form and is tethered to the Digital Cloud Space that manages the entire ecosystem. 

Using these two layers, IT leaders can re-enforce their strategic agenda, not dilute it by giving over control to willing but largely untrained users.

Where Digital Documents Have Come From

Digital documents are a new spin on documents. Like their analog predecessors, they share many of the same autonomous use characteristics.

One of the great things about documents is their familiarity with information workers and the fact that they democratize and simplify so many complex things that happen in a business.

Digital documents embrace this mantra but are a new digital construct for a digital era. 

Digital documents answer one of the biggest challenges facing IT teams in the fast-paced environment of digital transformations; namely, how to serve up the long-tail of applications that information workers need, particularly as organizations work hard to get innovation into the far reaches of the enterprise.

Comparing different digital document formats

PDF (Portable Document Format)

  • Digitized rich media document file
  • Contains data, design meta-data
  • Does not include if/then logic rules
  • Does not track user behaviours
  • Supports use on smartphones
  • Semi-autonomous—Requires PDF Adobe Acrobat installed to access full features of the file format, and PDF Reader app to read and use
  • Great for digital signatures and archival
  • Auto page numbering
  • Offers fullscreen presentation and basic features to turn PowerPoint presentations interactive

CDF (Canvas Document Format)

  • Smart digital rich media document file
  • Contains data, design meta-data and if/then logic rules
  • Supports use on smartphones
  • Tracks user behaviors
  • Semi-autonomous—Requires data fabric and presents as standard (secured or unsecured) HTML web page deployed to a dedicated URL or micro site
  • Auto page numbering (optional)
  • Supports rich media and can be fully interactive; great for distance learning course development, eBooks, and for capturing, processing, automating, analyzing, and sharing digital data and applications
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How digital documents deliver on Gartner’s top 10 data analytics trends

How digital documents deliver on Gartner’s top 10 data analytics trends

May 19, 2022 | Digital Data Fabric, Digital Documents, Digital Transformation

data analytics

An accelerated pace of change and the need for greater agility is increasing the demand for more consumable analytics. Read our analysis to see how incorporating Digital Documents into your digital strategy is creating digital leaders. Here we look at Gartner’s top 10 data analytics trends to show just how impactful digital documents can be.

1. Smarter, more responsible, scalable AI

According to Gartner, “Smarter, more responsible, scalable AI will enable better learning algorithms, interpretable systems, and shorter time to value. This means that AI technology must be able to operate with less data via “small data” techniques and adaptive machine learning.”

How Digital Documents respond

Digital documents can incorporate third-party code, plug-ins, and integration ware to extend the out-of-the-box design elements provided as standard. Therefore, very pointy problems and fine-grained tasks can be addressed at the edge of the enterprise—at scale. Hence why adopting digital documents sets a smarter and more adaptive balance between IT and ‘the business.’ IT experts can be brought in with high-code or low-code tools to embellish digital documents with artificial intelligence and software bots. Which make decisions, orchestrate workflows, pre-process data, and learn new things from patterns of data, etc.

According to Gartner, “Composing new digital solutions from the packaged business capabilities of each promotes productivity and agility. This is achieved using (served-up) components from multiple data, analytics, and AI solutions for a flexible, user-friendly, and usable experience. Therefore enabling leaders to connect data insights to business actions.”

2. Composable Data and Analytics

According to the Gartner report “Adopt a Composable DXP Strategy to Future-Proof Your Tech Stack,” 60% of mainstream organizations will use the composable business model as a strategic objective by 2023.

How Digital Documents respond

What makes digital documents the ideal substrate for serving up composable data and analytics at the edge of the enterprise comes from their versatility, adaptability, and federated nature. Digital documents respond to growing pressures to offer individuals and departments autonomy and empowerment. While all the time de-skilling technical complexity. However, for most IT leaders, the bigger win is to prevent a potential nightmarish appdev free-for-all as the consumerization of IT extends to citizen developers authoring apps unregulated by IT.

3. Data Fabric is the Foundation

According to Gartner, “As data becomes increasingly complex and digital business accelerates, data fabric is the architecture that will support composable data and analytics and its various components. Data fabric reduces the time for integration design by 30%, deployment by 30%, and maintenance by 70% because the technology designs draw on the ability to use/reuse and combine different data integration styles.”

How Digital Documents respond

Digital document architectures, like Encanvas, rest on a Digital Data Fabric to bring coherency, control, security, and governance. However, most specifically accessibility to quality data for businesspeople. Using digital documents does indeed allow business people to serve themselves with ways to capture, interpret, manage, publish, share, and store information. Of course, these are characteristically the roles performed previously in businesses by hard-copy documents. Combining digital documents with a digital data fabric equips these digital articles with (as Gartner puts it) ‘…the ability to use/reuse and combine different data integration styles.’

4. From Big to Small and Wide Data

According to Gartner, “Smarter, more responsible, scalable AI will enable better learning algorithms, interpretable systems, and shorter time to value. This means that AI technology must be able to operate with less data via “small data” techniques and adaptive machine learning.”

How Digital Documents respond

Pressures for data insights are so numerous, and so adaptive, across any enterprise these days. Hence why no central data analytics repository or capability could ever hope to satisfy all needs all the time. Above all, delivering ‘small data’ solutions widely across the enterprise demands more fluid, yet sublimely joined up and well thought out digital substrates. In a world of platforms and federated systems, digital documents uniquely offer the autonomy and dexterity needed to achieve this. They do this by pushing innovation to the extremities of the enterprise.

5. XOps

According to Gartner, “The goal of XOps (data, machine learning, model, platform) is to achieve efficiencies and economies of scale using DevOps best practices — and to ensure reliability, reusability, and repeatability while reducing the duplication of technology and processes and enabling automation.”

How Digital Documents respond

Should digital documents operate in a similar uncontrolled way as office desktop documents are used today? One can imagine some form of dystopian digital carnage happening across the enterprise. Thankfully, digital document platforms like Encanvas offer a three-tier architecture that contains and fully frames the use of data and digital documents. It means endpoints are protected, permissions are governed, and a higher (not lower) standard of operational control and governance is stamped on enterprise IT architectures.

6.  Engineering Decision Intelligence

According to Gartner, “Engineering decision intelligence applies to not just individual decisions, but also to sequences of decisions, grouping them into business processes and even networks of emergent decision making. When combined with composability and common data fabric, this enables organizations to more quickly gain insights needed to drive actions for the business.”

How Digital Documents respond

This serves to emphasize how any useful digital document architecture for the enterprise must reside on a foundational digital data fabric. In the case of Encanvas, digital data fabrics can coexist in digital cloud spaces. With each space being configured and governed by enterprise IT. This enforced balance of power between the governing layer of enterprise IT, and the consumerization of IT made possible by digital documents points to a successful and sustainable approach to information management that is proving to work admirably for digital leaders.

7. Data and Analytics as a Core Business

According to Gartner, “Business leaders are beginning to understand the importance of using data and analytics to accelerate digital business initiatives. Instead of being a secondary focus — completed by a separate team — data and analytics are shifting to a core function. However, business leaders often underestimate the complexities of data and end up missing opportunities.”

How Digital Documents respond

The use of digital documents as a readily accessible (and, as we’ve just covered, highly controlled) consumption layer of composable data allows business leaders to accelerate innovation plans. As Gartner suggests above, decisions surrounding data access, coherency, and quality are being made as part of digital document publishing initiatives across the enterprise. Partly, the success of codeless agile development methods comes from producing live wireframes. These combine real data, so that any data quality shortcomings or shortfalls come to light as digital documents are authored.

8. Graph relates everything

According to Gartner, “as many as 50% of its client inquiries around the topic of AI involve a discussion around the use of graph technology. Graph forms the foundation of modern data and analytics. Although graph technologies are not new to data and analytics, there has been a shift in the thinking around them as organizations identify an increasing number of use cases.”

How Digital Documents respond

Digital documents over unrivaled opportunities to embed sophisticated Graph solutions into rich media articles. One of the technology innovations that makes this possible is HyperDrive from Encanvas. This is a universal data plug that allows IT architects to consume existing applets, plug-ins, data visualization tools, data sources, APIs, and more. Which adds more horsepower to native design tools.

9. The rise of the Augmented Consumer

According to Gartner, “Traditionally, business users were restricted to predefined dashboards and manual data exploration. Often, this meant data and analytics dashboards were restricted to answering predefined questions. Moving forward, Gartner believes these dashboards will be replaced with automated, conversational, mobile, and dynamically generated insights customized to a user’s needs and delivered to their point of consumption.”

How Digital Documents respond

Digital documents are the ideal digital construct to support fine-grained consumer-driven analytics personalized to the action insight needs of the department or user. One of the bigger opportunities for digital documents moving forward is their role in facilitating curiosity across the enterprise. Additionally, to source answers to new questions as they emerge.

10. D&A at the Edge

According to Gartner, “As more data analytics technologies begin to live outside of the traditional data center and cloud environments, they’re moving closer to the physical assets, reducing or eliminating latency. Shifting data and analytics to the edge will open opportunities for data teams to scale capabilities and extend impact into different parts of the business. It can also provide solutions for situations where data can’t be removed from specific geographies for legal or regulatory reasons.”

How Digital Documents respond

Digital documents are the ideal digital construct to federate and democratize data analytics. Which in turn provides access to rich data analysis at the point of use.

Final thoughts—The Top Line

In summary, it is the known ambition of organizations to live and breathe digital and to augment people and decisions through actionable data insights. This is to attain the win. Win of (1) maximizing customer experience and personalization while applying hyper-automation methods and tools to lower service costs through automation.

As part of this agenda, Gartner points to the need for information systems that serve as a great opportunity for business leaders and decision-makers. It allows them to serve up their own fine-grained insights by having greater empowerment.

Fundamental to this newly empowered digital cultural philosophy is the ability to embrace new technologies in an active, dynamic, data-rich environment characterized by composable data gathered and consumed on the edge of the enterprise ‘where business happens.’

Documents, once the operational cornerstone of every business have come full circle with new digital document constructs. Today, as before, they are the workhorse glueware needed to bridge across systems, departments, and organizations. Which equips business people to build, personalize, tailor, apply and orchestrate communications and business processes without deep technical skills.

Digital documents deliver:

  1. The optimal balance of accessibility—thanks to their codeless make-up that de-skills authoring and management.
  2. Agility—served up through rapid time-to-value and ease of change.
  3. Enterprise-grade coherency—operating as they do across a digital data fabric that ensures deployed digital document solutions satisfy scalability, data governance, cybersecurity, and operational effectiveness qualifiers.
What can you do with digital documents?

What can you do with digital documents?

May 19, 2022 | Customer Data Platform, Data Management, Digital Documents, Digital Transformation, Software Development

Types of digital documents

Digital documents are a revolutionary tool enabling digital transformation for businesses. Discover some of the types of digital documents you can create using Encanvas.

Rich Media Content Experience

Content experience documents are all about engaging audiences in more impactful ways. A digital brochure (or eBook) combines rich media to produce persuasive, professionally crafted digital content. Rich media content—containing elements such as videos, testimonials, facts presented through interactive graphics, visualizations, etc.—increases stakeholder engagement, and improves customer experience, maximizing information consumption and use.

According to research into the opinions of 538 digital marketers conducted by Lemonlight in 2021, 81% plan to include video content in their marketing strategy over the next several years, while 94% said watching video content has helped them make a purchase decision at least once. Of those, 72% were swayed by a product video.

Distance Learning Courseware

Distance learning has transformed education. Digital courseware makes it faster and easier for courseware designers to design and publish courses. Furthermore, once published, digital courseware is a lot easier to update. One of its advantages comes from the ability to track learning journeys; sometimes, recording training and training results is essential for compliance.

Digital documents bring distance learning course development into the digital age. Take existing PowerPoint courseware and upgrade it to digital online courses in minutes. Use courses stand-alone or leverage an eLearning platform to manage them.

Web Forms

Web forms are another digital document example, as they’re used to capture data from customers and turn back-office processes into self-service experiences. Automating processes in this way not only improves customer experience by making more services on-demand but also increases customer engagement while reducing service costs.

Often, human-in-the-loop processes are re-engineered with the minimum amount of effort or fuss. Having captured data, workflow rules can be automated by software bots that also track and record customer interactions into Customer Data Platforms.

We’ve made forms integration with websites simpler too. Using Encanvas digital documents, web forms can be implemented as stand-alone solutions or be closely integrated with existing data repositories. Publish forms as secured permissions-based iFrames within existing websites, or link to public or private forms using dedicated URLs for direct access.

Digital Assistants

Software bots are great at recording transactions, making ‘micro-decisions’ across the enterprise, for harvesting and cleansing data, and moving it between locations. Many of the tedious tasks previously performed by humans and spreadsheet-powered data processing applications can be displaced by enterprise-grade IT solutions made possible by digital documents.

Spreadsheet Replacement and Micro Task Automation

While spreadsheets are versatile, they’re also labor-intensive. Give your knowledge workers more time to deliver value to customers and make a positive impact on innovation and business improvements by displacing spreadsheet apps with enterprise-grade digital document solutions. Our digital documents are powered by robots. That means, much of the heavy lifting that humans have previously done to capture, process, manage and analyze data can be discharged by software bots through automation.

Information Bridging GlueWare

Is your eCommerce front-end website fully automated with back-end systems? If so, then you’re ahead of the curve! Most organizations have a portion of their back-office data processing that goes ‘offline.’ This adds costs to service delivery costs while delaying customer requests and responses. Bottlenecks emerge and customer experience decays. The alternative is to use digital documents to bridge between systems and processes to create a ‘fully digital’ environment. The ability to leverage digital technologies to dramatically escalate time to value for digital transformations is increasingly being described as hyper-automation.

Data visualization

The possibilities to present and make sense of data using rich data visualization tools have grown dramatically thanks to innovations in cloud computing and big data tooling. Visualizations might come in the form of interactive maps used to track assets, parcels, people, vehicles or drones, or spatial charts and graphs that highlight key data attributes that would otherwise remain hidden to users.

Data processing

Arguably, the single biggest reason businesses invest in enterprise IT is to formalize and automate processes. Not so long ago, the way to do this was to invest in Systems of Record (SoR)—like Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft—that promised best practice data processing ‘templates’ that catered for the majority need and offered the assurety of robust and resilient data management and processing.

diagram of digital documents

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Digital documents versus apps

Digital documents versus apps

May 18, 2022 | Digital Documents, Digital Transformation

The differences between digital documents and app development

Modern business models dictate that companies must be data driven and always online.  Digital technology must be embraced to automate business processes in order for businesses to remain competitive and minimize human interventions.  As part of this digital transformation journey, digital documents serve a key role in democratizing IT for digital workers that have a need to work with and harness data in every aspect of their work lives.

Digital documents have been transformed in the past decade with the rise of new file formats like Canvas Document Format. Today, it’s possible for non-coding information workers to produce pretty much any style or form of information solution for the enterprise using digital documents as an alternative to back-room application development.

In this article, we compare digital document formats like Encanvas’ Digital Document Canvas with more traditional app development tools like FLUTTER, and answer the question—‘Which is best for a digital business?’

The COVID-19 pandemic has become somewhat of a watershed for the old ways of operating a business. Attitudes of ‘if it’s not bust don’t fix it’ don’t cut with the digital age.

Firms that resist embracing change as a constant—and as an opportunity for repeated rebirth—fail. Rapidly changing markets are causing organizations to push harder for flexibility in the way they work, and enterprise IT is not exempt from these pressures.

Rise of the citizen developer

With the growing popularity of low-code, no-code, and fully codeless software tools, it was thought not so long ago that citizen development and no-code software applications development tools would service the demand for distributed custom information processing and collaboration solutions in the enterprise.

That, however, has proven to be increasingly unrealistic and unviable owing to the need of IT professionals to stay in firm control of enterprise data and the data processing environment they are responsible for.

Pressure is on IT to govern data and information services

 It’s not easy for IT leadership teams to achieve the right balance between the pace of enterprise information systems development and information systems oversight.

Digital transformation demands have outstripped supply. There is a worldwide shortage of coding and analytical skills. In the meantime, every digital business sees technology as a fundamental component of its customer value, so demand for solutions development is high.

Enterprise IT these days is not just about serving up automation of business processes. Neither is it solely about serving the needs of information workers. It’s also about serving customers and other stakeholders.

Compliance pressures

 Underpinning all strategic IT decisions is another important balancing act; that between business opportunity and risk. With more compliance and regulation demands—such as cybersecurity, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), consumer credit regulations, banking regulations, etc.—IT leaders can’t encourage a free-for-all of digital solutions.

Demands for more solutions, delivered faster, to serve digital transformation

 The watchword for most businesses post the 2020 pandemic is adaptability.

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. We’re hearing new terminology from industry watchers like Gartner—like ‘composability’—arguing the case for more adaptive and flexible ways to produce information solutions.

IT leaders are faced with a difficult choice. They know they can’t possibly produce all the digital solutions the enterprise needs, but they also know they are unable to allow a free-for-all of information solutions engineering.

The solution, then, is to offer information workers digital tooling to serve themselves with the information analytics, collaboration, and data processing tooling they need under the strict governance of IT. And this is where modern intelligent digital documents are bringing value.

What intelligent digital documents have brought to the digital enterprise is a new level of information working autonomy

New digital document formats—like Encanvas’ Digital Document Canvas file format (CDF) are in essence a composite file that contains data, design, and logic rules in a single, coherent digital file.

The reason digital document adoption is rapidly growing comes down to the ability of digital documents to satisfy the digital holy trinity of the business, the IT function, and the information workers that use them.

Intelligent digital documents perform the characteristic autonomous roles of a document in the enterprise—i.e., to share data, capture it, process it, reporting on it, structure it, present it, bridge process workflows between systems and organizations, etc. However, in contrast to their structured document predecessors (such as PDF) new intelligent alternatives offer a new digital construct for a digital age.

Given that digital document solutions are built on codeless technology, information workers can design and publish them to discharge their information management tasks without calling in IT. 

Nevertheless, what makes digital document architecture ever more powerful are the IT-owned layers of the architectures they rest on.

What makes digital documents different to apps?

What makes digital documents different from apps is the level of autonomy they provide for information workers to work with data, formulate micro-processes, and use them relatively untethered to IT platforms and resources.

That should not infer that digital documents suffer the same regulatory challenges as citizen app development tools. Vendors work hard to ensure that governance over information architectures for IT leaders is a red-line priority.

What’s more, IT teams are often surprised by just how comprehensive their governance tools are.

FAQ

Digital technologies can be confusing.  For this reason, we’ve put together the explanatory notes below.

Electronic versus Digital Document

An electronic document is any document type created by a computer application.  A digital document is an HTML document format that takes on the form of a web page or micro-site.  Digital document formats hold ALL of the application logic needed to make them autonomous.

Digital Versus Digitized

A digitized document is an electronic file forma created by scanning a hard-copy document and turning it into a readable format using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology.

Digital Versus Digitized

A digitized document is an electronic file forma created by scanning a hard-copy document and turning it into a readable format using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology.