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.