Digital documents and analytics

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.

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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