Digital businesses capture, communicate, process, manage and store information with digital documents.
Digital documents are a great way to create easily distributed content to amplify your sales pitch, make presentations more persuasive, leverage data through analytics, streamline business processes, track things with IoT, and even take your business into the metaverse.
Encanvas Digital Document Canvases (we call them canvases for short) take documents forward into the new era of digital business. Like their hardcopy counterparts, digital documents are versatile. Use Encanvas digital document software to:
Promote offers, products and services with high-impact digital rich media content like eBooks, published for use on website, mobile, desktop, digital whiteboard and digital billboard platforms. Combine video content with graphics, images, transitions, eye-popping fonts, and hover over effects to produce communications that stand out.
Educate your stakeholder audience with distance learning courses that make your business the authority in its subject and draw crowds to your website. Use analytics to track delegate progress through lessons and courses.
Automate business processes using the latest HyperAutomation and Digital GlueWare built into digital document cloud architectures.
Present ideas and data using charts, graphics, dashboards, visualizations, maps and more to build persuasive presentations.
Morph from and to hardcopy for the best of both worlds. It’s easy to convert digital documents into print and vice versa.
Create an unparalleled customer experience with added personalization
Customer Experience today is a competitive game-changer. Having the means to bring maximum value to your buying audience by personalizing experiences to a much greater degree makes all the difference.
For decades, documents have been used to bring clarity and context to information, to bridge between organizations, and the processes that drive them. This added layer of digital flexibility is all important in the agile world of digital business.
It’s what Gartner describes as content ‘composability’ and it’s what increasingly makes the difference between digital leaders and laggards.
”Incorporating composability into digital business enables the enterprise or public agency to change and grow despite persistent uncertainty. Instead of avoiding the risk of change, executive leaders must reinvent their thinking to see change as a well-trusted tool for business resilience and growth.”—Gartner,2021
Key features of digital documents
Digital documents increase data literacy and shift the conversation away from tools and technology and toward decision-making as a business competency.
Encanvas digit document canvases combine composable data with software bots, edge data processing analytics, and graph technology to create personalized content and data experiences that generate business value in new ways.
Customer experience personalization
Whether it’s about tailoring digital brochures to suit customers, or creating business processes shaped to what differs you from competitors, digital documents can be used to shape your offerings and how your business works to best-fit your audiences.
Simplified transition from analog to digital documents
One of the biggest costs to any business is the cost of change, particularly when root and branch changes are needed. One of the inhibitors to change is the natural resistance to a new normal. Digital documents represent a new, yet familiar construct in the enterprise.
The majority of capabilities performed by analog/paper documents are easily replicated by digital documents (report publishing and distribution, marketing communications such as presentations, brochures, promotional materials, data capture forms, content framing, management, storage and archival).
This familiarity helps organizations embrace digital document constructs like canvases, when more technical concepts like applications, micro-sites and applets are alien and judged to be high-risk.
Deskill digital publishing
There is a global shortage of tech talent, with about 95% of employers having faced a skills shortage last year.
Encanvas uses templates with point-and-click design elements to simplify design and publishing. It makes creating documents painlessly, without the need for specialist design knowledge or coding skills. Everything you need is in your subscription.
Publish on all digital form factors
Whether you want to communicate on the web, mobile, smart TV, digital billboard/whiteboard, or something else, digital documents are a great way to share information.
Manage with software bots
Behind the scenes, Encanvas digital data fabric is powered by software bots that do all the heavy lifting of harvesting data, recording it, moving it, transforming it, preparing it for processing or presentation, etc.
Digital documents and analytics
According to Gartner, businesses will move from big data to ‘small and wide data.’ Digital documents have a key role to play in equipping businesses with this new type of data.
According to Gartner, ‘Small and wide data, as opposed to big data, solves a number of 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, is able to use data models that require less data but still offer useful insights.’
Track user visits
Digital documents benefit from rich data analytics built in, meaning that executives can interpret which content is most popular, even which particular content elements are drawing the most attention.
Optimize documents for SEO
Design documents to gain high visibility on web search engines like Google by leveraging integrated SEO optimization tools.
Keep data safe
Thanks to our PassPort technology, you’ll never have to worry about cyber security when it comes to the documents you publish (or the digital ecosystem you publish them on!).
Affordable scalability
Build as many digital documents as you need and change them as often as you like, without any extra costs.
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.
Documents have been reinvented over the past decade in the guise of digital document canvases; smart autonomous digital files that carry with them their own data, design and logic. In this article, we talk about the role of digital documents play in enterprise digital transformation.
Digital transformation is moving to the margins
When digital transformation first became a thing, the biggest area of technology investment was in customer service and experience. Since then, the projects found in the ‘DX box’ have moved progressively into the back-office. We have seen a new term ‘HyperAutomation’ arrive to speak of the game-changing pace of innovation needed to eradicate tedious manual administrative and data processing tasks that continue to plague organizations.
The need for business agility, spurred on by markets facing a faster pace of change, has increased pressures on IT to find a better balance between:
The business and IT function
Centralised and distributed data processing service
Information solutions
Autonomy and control
Discussions have shifted from a question of whether digital transformation is necessary or not, to one of scoping what priorities should be considered first. Of all the things a business can do to achieve sustainable growth, it’s becoming apparent that the biggest priority is to serve customers better.
How IT is responding to the digital transformation challenge
IT leaders are coming to realize the key battle is to equip executives and other information workers to better leverage data and nuance processes to better suit the always available, always personalised and always excellent customer service experience. All this, without losing control over the IT enterprise architecture, or putting data at risk.
The problem is, traditional IT strategic thinking (or resourcing) isn’t coping with the size of the challenge. According to one survey, 3-12 months is the average backlog for planned IT projects, and the situation is worsening as business project demand outstrips IT budget growth.
IT priorities for digital transformation
The Economist Intelligence Unit conducted a global survey and a series of in-depth interviews with IT and business decision-makers at major corporations. The top 3 areas for improvement priorities exposed were to:
Support remote workers (72%)
Integrate information and workflows across the organization (69%), and;
Change systems and processes quickly (69%).
The obvious conclusion, is that traditional approaches to software development, focused around a small core of centralized data processing systems and experts, is not keeping up with the long-tail of demand for new Information Management solutions.
Composability solutions for the enterprise
According to industry experts, the answer to this scaling issue—the stretch Information Management solutions—across the enterprise is ‘composability.’
One of the buzz-terms for digital transformation in 2022 is what Gartner describes as the consumability model. 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.’ To fulfil this agenda, digital leaders are adopting new composability architectures.
Digital documents represent one of two approaches to implementing composability for the enterprise. They are files composed by Information Workers that contain document rules and data that can be deployed to a URL or webpage in a stand-alone format, or conjoined together by IT professionals to create sophisticated information platforms and portals.
What you can do with digital documents
Digital documents make it simpler for Information Workers to serve themselves (and the processes they are responsible for) by creating information management solutions. Whether it’s a question of creating an eBook or digital brochure, distance learning course or mobile app, digital documents have the versatility to achieve the result. (Pointing to the adaptability of digital documents, one of the founders of Encanvas told me that his seven year old daughter had used Encanvas back in 2004 to compose a picture book, which is a far cry from the West Midlands Traffic Information Management System that also benefitted from using Encanvas ten years later!).
Digital documents are largely autonomous, but tethered
While analog paper documents are completely autonomous in their use, digital documents are tethered to the data fabric that serves them. Equally, even the data fabric operates within a cloud native Digital Cloud Space, which means even these architectural components are heavily governed.
Composing digital documents is unsurprisingly these days a no-code process using point-and-click tooling and pre-prepared design elements that follow a concept like LEGO bricks. The obvious alternative to digital documents are low-code citizen developer apps.
Vendors of digital document solutions argue that the data integrity and security safeguarding built into digital document architectures offer a safer way to federate information systems across a business, helping new digital innovations—like artificial intelligence, data analysis and graph technology, robotic process automation solutions, blockchain, IoT, etc.—to reach the edges of the enterprise.
How Encanvas Releases the Creativity of Digital Workers
Why is the autonomous use of digital documents important to digital transformation? In this article, we dig deeper to find out.
Citizen developers—nice idea, but not in an enterprise
Creating business applications is nontrivial. Even the simplest ones are a complex composite of data, presentation, workflow, logic roles, reports, and integrations.
Building applications is not for the faint-hearted. Something strange happens when documents produced on desktop applications, like a spreadsheet, are converted into web deployed and database-driven applications. They grow tentacles, and take on gargantuan proportions; doubling, or tripling in their size and complexity. And it helps when the authors of applications know some of the fundamental background issues of how database theory works, how data is presented on web browsers, and how if/then logic rules are applied.
Can a knowledge worker learn these skills? Yes, definitely. Is it a good idea to make every knowledge worker a citizen developer? Definitely not.
Sticking to the day job
Most people I know who run a business or are information workers don’t really harbor an unrelenting passion for coding software or building applications. They want to use tools to harness information and streamline processes. But, that’s where the passion ends.
Frustrated by the lack of useful tools to work with data can lead businesspeople to unimaginable attempts to build applications by themselves.
Even for those that want to build software applications (and, if that’s you, you’ve arguably chosen the wrong career if you’re not already in IT), using citizen development tools without some foundational training in IT is going to make your life extremely painful.
What’s more, for IT professionals, this idea really sucks. The buck stops with IT when things go wrong, when data is lost, when processes fail, and when information workers get stuck with using technology. Citizen development, however generous of heart, is a bad idea in a highly regulated environment like a company in the 2000s.
The motives for citizen development are in the right place
While one might question the act of citizen development, nobody can surely argue with the motives of those that engage in the practice. For digital businesses, useful ways to capture, process, publish, analyze, automate and collaborate with data are a key element of the customer value being served up.
When executives and information workers hit a wall with underperforming or unsuitable software tools, who could do anything but admire their pluck for picking up a citizen development tool and jolly well having a go at building apps themselves. All very admirable, but there are other ways of achieving the outcomes you seek without becoming a pin-up poster dartboard in the IT department.
Autonomous digital documents
Digital documents are the logical evolution of the document form for the digital age. Like their analog (hardcopy) and digitized (think PDF) predecessors, intelligent digital documents are easier to work with than citizen applications.
Autonomy of use is the key factor with digital documents. They exist on a digital data fabric that spans the enterprise serving up composable data, and are, to some extent, tethered to the digital cloud space that serves them up. Nevertheless, for users, they feel empowering and very much autonomous of large IT.
Autonomy means that information workers are free to do ‘as much as digital documents empower them to do’ without the risk of breaking anything important in the enterprise architecture.
A better outcome for software app seekers and solvers
The win: win for IT leaders, is that enterprise digital document architectures provide a high level of attribution control for IT teams, so they can give information workers enough rope to do what they need to do, without losing control over endpoint security, data structures, technical architectures, and process workflows. An additional layer of no-code administrative tools make light work of tedious IT admin tasks such as replication, backup, data security monitoring, etc.
They can give information workers the digital tooling they need to work with data, without suffering the nightly anxieties of handing over the keys of their kingdom to untrained and unregulated citizen developers.
Release The Creativity of Your Workforce With Digital Document Publishing
How Digital Documents Bring Creative Autonomy to Digital Workers
Written by Ian C. Tomlin | 19th October 2023
For decades, digital workers have lacked digital documents to organize data, produce communications and capture data as they did in the analog world of business using analog documents. Thankfully, digital documents have arrived giving autonomy to digital workers allowing them to explore their creative side with data and interactive audience experiences. Read this article to learn more.
Breaking Free from IT and Platforms
Are you tired of waiting on IT to create basic reports, web pages, forms and presentations? Do static documents fail to capture your audience’s imagination? Introducing the game-changer: Encanvas digital documents. This innovative new document format empowers business users like you to create interactive, data-driven documents – all without relying on technical expertise or bogging down the IT department.
Forget complex coding languages! Encanvas documents leverage no-code tools, allowing anyone with a basic understanding of computers to build sophisticated documents. Imagine drag-and-drop interfaces where you can easily incorporate charts, graphs, and other interactive elements.
Digital documents make building engaging online documents, data-entry forms and standalone ‘one-page apps and reports’ as simple as using your favorite word processor.
Living Documents, Always Relevant
Say goodbye to outdated information! Encanvas documents can be linked to live databases, ensuring your content is always current. This eliminates the need for static documents constantly requiring revisions. Updates in the database automatically reflect within the document, saving you time and effort.
Releasing the Creativity Within
Encanvas digital documents are more than just tools; they empower business users to take ownership of their communication. You gain the autonomy to create professional and engaging documents that effectively convey your message and build conversations with your audience, without relying on IT. This not only saves valuable time but also fosters a culture of innovation and self-sufficiency within your organization. Furthermore, with digital documents, you can see what your audience likes, where they go in the document …what sparks their interest!
Hello Interactive Experiences
Static documents are a thing of the past. Encanvas documents transform information into captivating experiences. Embed videos, live polls, and interactive forms directly into your content. This fosters audience engagement, allowing viewers to actively participate and gain a deeper understanding of your message.
Telling Stories With Data
Data is powerful, but raw numbers can be overwhelming. With encanvas documents, you can leverage data visualization tools to present information clearly and compellingly. Transform complex datasets into stunning charts and graphs, making trends and insights readily apparent. Tell compelling data stories that resonate with your audience, without relying on a data analyst to create them.
Mirroring the Dexterity of Paper Documents
Go back thirty years and every business used paper documents to sign contracts, capture data, communicate with customers, write training courses, share reports, and archive records. When there wasn’t an app or the possibility of building an automated data transfer between two parties, documents were the automatic go-to.
With Encanvas Digital Documents, digital workers can enjoy similar autonomy to ‘get things done’ with a versatile database-driven and interactive digital document that makes it easy for everyone (without deep database knowledge or scripting know-how) to capture, communicate and store data.
The Future of Business Communications
Encanvas documents represent the future of business communication. They empower business users like you to become storytellers, data analysts, and content creators – all rolled into one. With intuitive tools and powerful features, you can create dynamic and impactful documents that captivate your audience and drive results.
So, ditch the dependence on IT and embrace the power of encanvas documents. Start building your own interactive masterpieces and unleash the communicator within!
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.
