Digital Versus Digitized Documents

How Documents Are Evolving to Support Digital Business

Written by Ian C. Tomlin | 12th January 2024

In this article, we uncover the big divide between old and new document technologies.

Documents, The Lifeblood of Business Administration

For a decade, business people have seen a move away from paper and documents in the office. It’s left many wondering how long businesses like theirs would continue to see multi-functional printers in the corner of the office. In the past, documents have been the staple diet of business. Companies have consumed reams of paper to automate processes, report, record, share, and generally use information.

For information workers, documents are convenient, easy to use, and offer them a level of autonomy to ‘get things done’ that technology still woefully lacks. There are certainly sound financial reasons NOT to use paper forms. Printing paper documents can be expensive, especially in full color. The advantages of digitized forms go beyond economies in printing. Not only are digital documents easier for computers to read, they don’t demand physical storage space compared to paper documents. Furthermore, there’s no need to pay a fortune to convert paper forms into a digital format later down the line.

One aspect of the digitized document that has held it back somewhat is the old guard of people familiar with reading, reporting, sharing, and storing paper documents. The adage ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’ applies here. Many die hard printed document users don’t want to change their ways. They don’t like reading electronic documents from a screen.

Best Uses for Digitized Documents

There is a significant difference between a digitized and a digital document. For most users, a digitized document is nothing more than a document structure with data melded into a file. It is an opportunity to capture, process, sign, view, and save documents in a format that computers understand. Using Adobe’s proprietary Acrobat software—which isn’t cheap by the way—users can add a bit of interactivity into their digitized documents. Another feature of the full-fat version of PDF is that it allows data to be added to digitized documents in the form of basic fields.

This does make life easier for digital data capture and beats sending someone a Word document to complete. However, it’s not digital transformation by any means.

For marketers, one other stand-out feature of full-fat PDF should also be mentioned; the means to present PDF documents in full-screen mode with a black background. This looks so much cooler than the standard PDF view. Combine PDF with their party tools, like Flipsnack, and you can share electronic documents that work like a paper document with flipping pages (cool!).

New intelligent digital document formats—like CDF— don’t displace the role of their digitized predecessors. PDF will remain useful for signatures, archival, etc. for many years to come. Instead, they answer the new demands being placed on documents for the digital age. Which requires a wholly new digital file construct.

5 Things That Make Digital Documents Useful

1. Autonomy of use

Like their hardcopy paper and digitized predecessors, this new document format can be used in a relatively autonomous way. That said, they are tethered to the Digital Clustered Cloud Space that manages them, and connected to a Digital Data Fabric that serves up composable data to users, so there’s no need to do quite so much of that tedious data crunching and cleansing work to make harvested data useful.

The autonomy of use offered by digital documents is good news for information workers because they finally have the means to serve themselves with the information management and publishing tools they need to get their work done without constantly having to go to IT for more apps. It’s good news for IT teams because they can serve the long-tail of demand for apps across the business without having to lose control over enterprise architecture, data organization and data security to a citizen developer free-for-all.

2. Rich media, interactive document publishing

You can do a lot of things with digital documents. For one thing, they support rich media, so if you want to produce an elegant digital brochure for your website, or eBook, the world is your oyster. Once you’ve composed your eBook, to take it online, you can assign a URL, or post your page into an iFrame to embed it into your website. This makes digital documents extremely handy for marketers. Another great feature of digital documents is that you can track user behaviors to see what content is interesting to your audience. Want to publish your PowerPoint presentation as an interactive document online? Yep, you can do that too!

3. Custom distance learning courseware with tracking

Those responsible for learning management across their enterprise will find digital documents handy too. Not only can you quickly turn PowerPoints into fully standalone interactive courses—complete with assessments, tests, and pre-qualifiers—you can record who has been trained. Connect courses into an eLearning system and you can offer learners the means to return to courses from the point where they left.

4. Mobile and desktop information management ‘apps’

Displacing the need to code, digital documents empower information workers to work with data on their terms, without having to build applications or suffer spreadsheets.

Data is served up in a composable format from a Digital Data Fabric, making it easier to work with—even when it’s been gathered from multiple data sources and systems. Use of no-code drag-and-drop design elements means that documents are easy to compose for business people who don’t have a black belt in computing.

5. Analytics and report publishing

Digital documents support plugins provided by IT teams, so that higher levels of sophistication can be added to the base features information workers use.

One example of how this can be applied comes in the form of interactive graphs, charts and dashboards. Digital documents make it easier to harvest data insights from across a series of data points, to then spin up a one page report for either temporary or permanent use.

DIGITAL DOCUMENTS REMASTERED

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

From Digitized to Digital Documents

PDF is arguably the best-known electronic document format. It comes in a variety of forms (notably 1b is the preferred option for digitized document archival), and it’s been around for over twenty years.

PDF is most commonly used for converting unstructured documents (hard copy) into a digitized form that computers can read. More recently, PDF has seen a greater lease of life thanks to digital signatures.

That means, if you’ve ever scanned a document, you’ve probably used either an unstructured image or a PDF to present and share the information.

Setting The Optimal Balance Between It and The Business

While the notion of making information capture, processing, automation, analytics, and collaboration more accessible to information workers is desirable, the risk faced by IT leaders is to encourage a free-for-all of citizen apps. This would only result in further complicating the data architecture of the business.

This is where digital documents can deliver results. They are wedded to a Digital Data Fabric layer that serves up data in a composable form and is tethered to the Digital Cloud Space that manages the entire ecosystem.

Using these two layers, IT leaders can re-enforce their strategic agenda, not dilute it by giving over control to willing but largely untrained users.

Where Digital Documents Have Come From

Digital documents are a new spin on documents. Like their analog predecessors, they share many of the same autonomous use characteristics.

One of the great things about documents is their familiarity with information workers and the fact that they democratize and simplify so many complex things that happen in a business.

Digital documents embrace this mantra but are a new digital construct for a digital era.

Digital documents answer one of the biggest challenges facing IT teams in the fast-paced environment of digital transformations; namely, how to serve up the long-tail of applications that information workers need, particularly as organizations work hard to get innovation into the far reaches of the enterprise.

Comparing different digital document formats

PDF (Portable Document Format)

Digitized rich media document file
Contains data, design meta-data
Does not include if/then logic rules
Does not track user behaviours
Supports use on smartphones
Semi-autonomous—Requires PDF Adobe Acrobat installed to access full features of the file format, and PDF Reader app to read and use
Great for digital signatures and archival
Auto page numbering
Offers fullscreen presentation and basic features to turn PowerPoint presentations interactive

CDF (Canvas Document Format)

Smart digital rich media document file
Contains data, design meta-data and if/then logic rules
Supports use on smartphones
Tracks user behaviors
Semi-autonomous—Requires data fabric and presents as standard (secured or unsecured) HTML web page deployed to a dedicated URL or micro site
Auto page numbering (optional)
Supports rich media and can be fully interactive; great for distance learning course development, eBooks, and for capturing, processing, automating, analyzing, and sharing digital data and applications