Documents for a digital age
Documents have been reinvented over the past decade in the guise of digital document canvases; smart autonomous digital files that carry with them their own data, design and logic. In this article, we talk about the role of digital documents play in enterprise digital transformation.
Digital transformation is moving to the margins
When digital transformation first became a thing, the biggest area of technology investment was in customer service and experience. Since then, the projects found in the ‘DX box’ have moved progressively into the back-office. We have seen a new term ‘HyperAutomation’ arrive to speak of the game-changing pace of innovation needed to eradicate tedious manual administrative and data processing tasks that continue to plague organizations.
The need for business agility, spurred on by markets facing a faster pace of change, has increased pressures on IT to find a better balance between:
- The business and IT function
- Centralised and distributed data processing service
- Information solutions
- Autonomy and control
Discussions have shifted from a question of whether digital transformation is necessary or not, to one of scoping what priorities should be considered first. Of all the things a business can do to achieve sustainable growth, it’s becoming apparent that the biggest priority is to serve customers better.
How IT is responding to the digital transformation challenge
IT leaders are coming to realize the key battle is to equip executives and other information workers to better leverage data and nuance processes to better suit the always available, always personalised and always excellent customer service experience. All this, without losing control over the IT enterprise architecture, or putting data at risk.
The problem is, traditional IT strategic thinking (or resourcing) isn’t coping with the size of the challenge. According to one survey, 3-12 months is the average backlog for planned IT projects, and the situation is worsening as business project demand outstrips IT budget growth.
IT priorities for digital transformation
The Economist Intelligence Unit conducted a global survey and a series of in-depth interviews with IT and business decision-makers at major corporations. The top 3 areas for improvement priorities exposed were to:
- Support remote workers (72%)
- Integrate information and workflows across the organization (69%), and;
- Change systems and processes quickly (69%).
The obvious conclusion, is that traditional approaches to software development, focused around a small core of centralized data processing systems and experts, is not keeping up with the long-tail of demand for new Information Management solutions.
Composability solutions for the enterprise
According to industry experts, the answer to this scaling issue—the stretch Information Management solutions—across the enterprise is ‘composability.’
One of the buzz-terms for digital transformation in 2022 is what Gartner describes as the consumability model. Gartner describes business composability as ‘…a strategy and capability to apply modularity to any business asset — people, processes, technologies and even physical assets — so that leaders can quickly, easily and safely recompose them and create new value in response to disruption.’ To fulfil this agenda, digital leaders are adopting new composability architectures.
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.
Digital documents represent one of two approaches to implementing composability for the enterprise. They are files composed by Information Workers that contain document rules and data that can be deployed to a URL or webpage in a stand-alone format, or conjoined together by IT professionals to create sophisticated information platforms and portals.
What you can do with digital documents
Digital documents make it simpler for Information Workers to serve themselves (and the processes they are responsible for) by creating information management solutions. Whether it’s a question of creating an eBook or digital brochure, distance learning course or mobile app, digital documents have the versatility to achieve the result. (Pointing to the adaptability of digital documents, one of the founders of Encanvas told me that his seven year old daughter had used Encanvas back in 2004 to compose a picture book, which is a far cry from the West Midlands Traffic Information Management System that also benefitted from using Encanvas ten years later!).
Digital documents are largely autonomous, but tethered
While analog paper documents are completely autonomous in their use, digital documents are tethered to the data fabric that serves them. Equally, even the data fabric operates within a cloud native Digital Cloud Space, which means even these architectural components are heavily governed.
Composing digital documents is unsurprisingly these days a no-code process using point-and-click tooling and pre-prepared design elements that follow a concept like LEGO bricks. The obvious alternative to digital documents are low-code citizen developer apps.
Vendors of digital document solutions argue that the data integrity and security safeguarding built into digital document architectures offer a safer way to federate information systems across a business, helping new digital innovations—like artificial intelligence, data analysis and graph technology, robotic process automation solutions, blockchain, IoT, etc.—to reach the edges of the enterprise.