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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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Deliver small and wide data with digital documents 

Deliver small and wide data with digital documents 

May 18, 2022 | Business Intelligence, Business Intelligence Software, Digital Documents

Deliver small and wide data with digital documents

Gartner Says 70% of Organizations Will Shift Their Focus From Big to Small and Wide Data

Written by Ian C. Tomlin | 16th December 2023

Gartner is speaking about small and wide data but what do they mean?  Read this article to get up-to-speed on how businesses are re-thinking their consumption of business data to create data-driven decisions with solutions like Encanvas’ digital documents.

Dashboards Aren’t Good For Business

A dashboard is a human interface that helps humans to understand data. At one time, the use of dashboards was all the rage in business. But not so much today.

Every dashboard requires a human to power it which costs time and money.

Dashboards have traditionally been designed for back-office users to make sense of data, interpret it, to then send out reports and make decisions. That doesn’t make sense either. Better instead to have automated, conversational, mobile, and dynamically generated insights customized to a user’s needs and delivered to their point of consumption. That way, data becomes actionable and reaches the people best placed to lever its value.

That’s where digital documents come in.

How digital documents create ‘small and wide’ data analytics

In this era of digital transformation, big data and composable applications, the digital document is king. It means that individual analytical experiences can be created at scale, and speed. The way Gartner describes this is is ‘small and wide’ data analytics

“Small and wide data, as opposed to big data, solves several problems for organizations dealing with increasingly complex questions on AI and challenges with scarce data use cases. Wide data — leveraging “X analytics” techniques — enables the analysis and synergy of a variety of small and varied (wide), unstructured and structured data sources to enhance contextual awareness and decisions. Small data, as the name implies, can use data models that require less data but still offer useful insights.”—Gartner

How digital documents create ‘small and wide’ data analytics

Digital documents take analytics to the edge.  Today, more data analytics technologies live outside of the traditional data center and cloud environments. This move from centralized data processing and analytics to edge technologies, like digital documents, reduces or eliminates latency for data-centric solutions and enables more real-time value.

Preparing data — the crucial role of data fabrics

Anyone that’s been involved in data analytics and producing dashboards and reports knows that getting the right data, at the right quality, and at the right time is the biggest challenge. Once these challenges have been overcome, presenting data these days is pretty straightforward. But getting the data stuff right is tremendously time-consuming and, unless automation are involved, they can mean late night for someone with a spreadsheet.  Thankfully, data fabrics underpin digital documents to establish a higher standard of data accessibility, integrity and quality. Rather than performing the heavy lifting of integration, extract, transform and load functions, digital documents only need to concentrate on shaping the end product, maybe a little blending of data from different tables and making it pretty—not much more.

Moving from dashboards to answers

In an era of artificial intelligence and machine-to-machine workflows, it doesn’t make much sense to build dashboards for people to look at when all they need is to know when change happens. Advanced digital document analytical solutions work with software bots (in the data fabric) to automate data alerts highlighting to humans when they need to examine data, rather than asking them to look at dashboards that yield limited value.

Answering new questions

One reason centralized data analytics fails lies in the fact that information workers these days are constantly curious, repeatedly asking new questions of data. Serving up all these queries in the form of dashboards and charts is an impossible task. The solution is to give information workers their own codeless tools to examine data and answer their own questions, while serving up high quality insights.

The only minor challenge is getting the balance right in this equation; I.e., ensuring information workers know enough about the data they’re looking at to appreciate its context of use. For example, when invoices aren’t billed until the end of the month, the only time during a month that some financial records will present a complete picture for decision makers is the minute after the last record is reconciled. Combining a digital data fabric with a composable solution like digital documents gives IT professionals the best possible opportunity to get this balance right for stakeholders.

The ambition of many business leaders in the digital age is to create a team of people in a business that are constantly curious, constantly questioning the norm and working out the difference of doing better things over doing things better.

Forging this new style of enterprise demands that information workers are given the tools to do the job. Access to information and information systems is key to this. But to democratize and de-skill IT comes with risks. Setting the right balance between IT and the business is the rump issue. Adopting a cloud native digital platform that offers a composable solution for information consumption, underpinned by a data fabric, may be a good way to achieve the results you seek.

Digital documents and analytics

Digital documents and analytics

May 18, 2022 | Business Intelligence, Business Intelligence Software, Digital Documents

Business digital data analysis

Digital business is driven by data. This article investigates how are digital documents transforming accessibility to the insights executives and information workers need?

Digital business has ramped up the need to insights

If you’re as old as I am you might remember the era of green sheet reports from the data center. Then, we went through a period of Harvard Graphics reports that did away with slides. Business intelligence promised to change everything, but was so slow and costly to roll-out that few implementations delivered on their promises. Then came the cloud and big data.

Even now, after decades of trying to get corporate reporting more useful, there is a huge gap between the centralized data analytics platforms that serve up insights, and the needs of decision makers and information workers.

Do you know what characteristics go into making a top 10 customer? How much profit you make by customer? A typical deal?

The nature of a digital age is that, behind every question is a curious mind with another new question. And the data needs to be fed in real time. Some systems track user behaviors while data is in transit, simply because decision makers trying to grow their businesses don’t have time to wait.

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DIGITAL DOCUMENTS REMASTERED

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

There are some truly excellent business intelligence tools on the market today. Each comes with its own blend of swishy 3D charts, smooth transitions and visualization tools.

For most people, the idea of being able to harness actionable data insights incentivises them to become a citizen developer and start experimenting with these tools to self-serve some results.

However, few people want to invest chunks of their week to perform reporting tasks if it could be done otherwise. Digital documents offer a simpler way to find answers to new questions, without having to become an expert in BI.

The role of a data fabric is key to data value

One of the features of a digital document architecture that makes it so valuable comes in the form of the digital data fabric this architecture resides on.

This is an umbrella of data harvesting, transformation and automation tooling—powered by software bots and AI—that brings data together from its various locations and re-blends it together so that digital document users can compose new solutions with it.

The data mashup capabilities of the digital document come into their own, once IT administrators have setup this powerful capability to forge a single view of data from across the enterprise.

Autonomy of digital documents is key to distributed insights

And this is where digital documents come in. Using digital documents, people enjoy the autonomy to harvest the actionable insights they need quickly, because the data fabric they reside on has already prepared data into a composable form.

There is no need to spend half a day designing a dashboard and the other half cleansing data to make it useful. Additionally, use of HyperDrive and it’s remarkable ability to consume any third-party data, DLL, COM+ object, or C# code without scripting means that business analysts can assist employees by filling any shortcomings in desktop features by adding tooling as needed.

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How Encanvas helped Overall Eesti become data-driven

How Encanvas helped Overall Eesti become data-driven

May 18, 2022 | Data Driven Decision Making, Data Management, Data-Driven Culture, Digital Data Fabric, Digital Documents, Digital Transformation, Digital Transformation Platform

Data driven businesspeople

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.

5 Reasons to invest in Digital Documents

May 18, 2022 | Application Platform, lo-no code software, Software Development, Uncategorized

invest in digital documentsThis document highlights five major reasons to invest in an enterprise platform like Encanvas that supports the lifecycle of digital documents.

Remastering the document for a digital age

Documents have always been useful to businesses. They are easy to create and use, perform countless roles—by making information easier to capture, process, distribute, share, and store—and, perhaps most importantly, they are a familiar concept that people understand.

Read our article on digital documents and innovation

Intelligent digital documents

The use of intelligent digital documents is on the rise, responding to the demands of digital business. This new digital file construct—that combines document data with design and logic rules whilst still remaining largely autonomous in its use—is breathing new life to the role of documents in businesses.

Digital documents are a form of what Gartner calls a composable application. (Interestingly, composable applications come #5 in Gartner’s top 2022 priorities.)

They are built from business-centric modular components and make it easier to use and reuse data and code, accelerating the time to market for new information solutions and releasing enterprise value.

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.

While digital documents are considered to be essential in the democratization of IT, their autonomy of use is not without rules or governance. Indeed, IT teams have greater control and governance over digital documents than they enjoy with the self-authored apps of citizen developers. But, what this autonomous use does bring is an insane level of versatility in the range of information publishing, management, and processing use cases digital documents can deliver across your business.

Read about intelligent digital documents

Reasons to invest in digital documents

1. Drive business agility

Demands for agility come from the recognition that markets and business models are changing progressively faster. To see change as an opportunity, not a business threat requires an organization to see the need for agility as a constant. This agilization of the enterprise covers all areas including decision-making culture, supply chain, resourcing, people, and not least systems and processes.

The Nordics arm of Deloitte’s took the time in 2021 to conduct detailed research into the importance of business agility to leaders and found that 67 percent of respondents saw business agility as having a high priority across their organization.

Composable technology, like digital documents, cascades access to information—and information sharing and processing tooling—across the enterprise, allowing departments and individuals to craft better ways to analyze data and get things done without calling on IT every time a spreadsheet isn’t the answer.

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

2. Deliver innovations faster, at lower IT costs, while de-skilling access to information services

Tech talent is hard to find, and the competition is so fierce, leading to a 14% upshift in operating costs in some US states.  Meanwhile, in the UK, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)  report on the tech skills gap suggests that data analysis is the fastest growing skills cluster in tech and is set to expand by 33% in the next five years.

Applications developments are high-risk and costly. Everyone knows it. Still, the move to make tech solutions—such as mobile apps—an integral part of the customer value offered by digital businesses means every IT function today has a long tail of app dev demands.

Thankfully, digital documents aren’t quite the same as apps. They are more autonomous. They are truly codeless. And, they combine with cloud-native digital cloud spaces and digital data fabrics to allow IT, teams, to retain control over their tech stack, even while providing business stakeholders with the information solutions they need. That’s good news when there’s a global shortage of tech talent.

3. Maximize the value of data

Watch any video of Bezos talking about business, Amazon’s growth, or his own life lessons, and within seconds he will inevitably talk about customer-centricity and the value Amazon derives from data. Extracting value from data—not just gathering it—is critical to any digital business. And it’s in this second phase of ‘harvesting value from data’ that digital documents bring real value.

The challenge most companies face when it comes to data value is threefold:

  1. Executives don’t take data value (or quality) seriously enough as a contributor to business success, and often adopt slack KPI recording of performance in this capability.
  2. The data management and governance across an enterprise—compromised as it is so often by systems and departmental silos—is not ‘composable’ by the business decision-makers that need it.
  3. Executives and information workers lack the autonomy of action—or information management tooling—to maximize data value and use.

Digital documents allow executives and information workers to fully leverage the data at their disposal to answer new questions as they emerge. Additionally, digital documents can capture further enrichment data associated with a subject—by cross-fertilizing with third-party data or adding custom data fields—that brings more value to data.

4. Cascade digital innovations like AI and graph technology to the edge of the enterprise

Since the birth of enterprise computing, the focus on data processing and its use has seesawed between centralized and distributed systems.

This pendulum has been about leveling up cost, availability, and control over IT. That is to say, finding the ideal state between these three core considerations has never been easy.

The general shift over the past few years—thanks in part to cloud computing and big data—has been a move to large-scale centralized processing. But centralized economies and the assumed advantages in data and systems governance served up by cloud computing result in less autonomy and access for information workers to harness and adapt technology to serve business needs at the edge of the enterprise.

5. Rebalance the relationship between IT and THE BUSINESS

The overriding reason digital documents are facing a high pace of adoption within enterprise technical teams comes down to their ability to apply a new and practical balance between business demands and IT priorities.

Since the digital economy landed—and started to place unreasonable demands on IT teams whose resources were already overstretched by business continuity, compliance, and renewal challenges—there has been an unquenchable demand from front-line enterprise departments for more applications. This is hardly surprising; the consumerization of IT made it plain to many businesspeople that the quality of the software they were being served up and asked to live with was far behind the curve of what companies like Google and Facebook were serving up to consumers for free. Information workers of the 1990s were frazzled by having to work late nights with spreadsheets, while fully aware that their databases were perfectly capable of achieving more in less time, and with less hassle.

Digital documents offer digital workers empowerment; that much is reasonably obvious: They don’t have to go to the IT department door with a begging bowl for new applications to work with data. What is less obvious, is how game-changing digital documents are for IT teams. While digital documents are convenient and accessible to the mass of workers in a digital business, for IT professionals with skills, there are no limits to the possibilities to innovate, whilst throwing a veil of robust IT protocols across the enterprise to improve control, data security, applications governance, replication, and scaling safeguards, etc.

Above all, digital documents form a thoughtfully designed balance between the needs of the business, and the needs of IT; one that favors both parties.

Digital documents and the Low-Code / No-Code software industry

May 18, 2022 | lo-no code software

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.  

While a seven year old child can publish an eBook online using a digital document, an IT professional can single-handedly build a system to run the traffic information management of a cityscape using the same tool-kit. 

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.