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.