This document highlights five major reasons to invest in an enterprise platform like Encanvas that supports the lifecycle of digital documents.

Remastering the document for a digital age

Documents have always been useful to businesses. They are easy to create and use, perform countless roles—by making information easier to capture, process, distribute, share, and store—and, perhaps most importantly, they are a familiar concept that people understand.

Read our article on digital documents and innovation

Intelligent digital documents

The use of intelligent digital documents is on the rise, responding to the demands of digital business. This new digital file construct—that combines document data with design and logic rules whilst still remaining largely autonomous in its use—is breathing new life to the role of documents in businesses.

Digital documents are a form of what Gartner calls a composable application. (Interestingly, composable applications come #5 in Gartner’s top 2022 priorities.)

They are built from business-centric modular components and make it easier to use and reuse data and code, accelerating the time to market for new information solutions and releasing enterprise value.

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.

While digital documents are considered to be essential in the democratization of IT, their autonomy of use is not without rules or governance. Indeed, IT teams have greater control and governance over digital documents than they enjoy with the self-authored apps of citizen developers. But, what this autonomous use does bring is an insane level of versatility in the range of information publishing, management, and processing use cases digital documents can deliver across your business.

Read about intelligent digital documents

Reasons to invest in digital documents

1. Drive business agility

Demands for agility come from the recognition that markets and business models are changing progressively faster. To see change as an opportunity, not a business threat requires an organization to see the need for agility as a constant. This agilization of the enterprise covers all areas including decision-making culture, supply chain, resourcing, people, and not least systems and processes.

The Nordics arm of Deloitte’s took the time in 2021 to conduct detailed research into the importance of business agility to leaders and found that 67 percent of respondents saw business agility as having a high priority across their organization.

Composable technology, like digital documents, cascades access to information—and information sharing and processing tooling—across the enterprise, allowing departments and individuals to craft better ways to analyze data and get things done without calling on IT every time a spreadsheet isn’t the answer.

According to the Gartner report “Adopt a Composable DXP Strategy to Future-Proof Your Tech Stack,” 60% of mainstream organizations will see the composable business model as a strategic objective by 2023.

2. Deliver innovations faster, at lower IT costs, while de-skilling access to information services

Tech talent is hard to find, and the competition is so fierce, leading to a 14% upshift in operating costs in some US states.  Meanwhile, in the UK, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)  report on the tech skills gap suggests that data analysis is the fastest growing skills cluster in tech and is set to expand by 33% in the next five years.

Applications developments are high-risk and costly. Everyone knows it. Still, the move to make tech solutions—such as mobile apps—an integral part of the customer value offered by digital businesses means every IT function today has a long tail of app dev demands.

Thankfully, digital documents aren’t quite the same as apps. They are more autonomous. They are truly codeless. And, they combine with cloud-native digital cloud spaces and digital data fabrics to allow IT, teams, to retain control over their tech stack, even while providing business stakeholders with the information solutions they need. That’s good news when there’s a global shortage of tech talent.

3. Maximize the value of data

Watch any video of Bezos talking about business, Amazon’s growth, or his own life lessons, and within seconds he will inevitably talk about customer-centricity and the value Amazon derives from data. Extracting value from data—not just gathering it—is critical to any digital business. And it’s in this second phase of ‘harvesting value from data’ that digital documents bring real value.

The challenge most companies face when it comes to data value is threefold:

1. Executives don’t take data value (or quality) seriously enough as a contributor to business success, and often adopt slack KPI recording of performance in this capability.
2. The data management and governance across an enterprise—compromised as it is so often by systems and departmental silos—is not ‘composable’ by the business decision-makers that need it.
3. Executives and information workers lack the autonomy of action—or information management tooling—to maximize data value and use.

Digital documents allow executives and information workers to fully leverage the data at their disposal to answer new questions as they emerge. Additionally, digital documents can capture further enrichment data associated with a subject—by cross-fertilizing with third-party data or adding custom data fields—that brings more value to data.

4. Cascade digital innovations like AI and graph technology to the edge of the enterprise

Since the birth of enterprise computing, the focus on data processing and its use has seesawed between centralized and distributed systems.

This pendulum has been about leveling up cost, availability, and control over IT. That is to say, finding the ideal state between these three core considerations has never been easy.

The general shift over the past few years—thanks in part to cloud computing and big data—has been a move to large-scale centralized processing. But centralized economies and the assumed advantages in data and systems governance served up by cloud computing result in less autonomy and access for information workers to harness and adapt technology to serve business needs at the edge of the enterprise.

5. Rebalance the relationship between IT and THE BUSINESS

The overriding reason digital documents are facing a high pace of adoption within enterprise technical teams comes down to their ability to apply a new and practical balance between business demands and IT priorities.

Since the digital economy landed—and started to place unreasonable demands on IT teams whose resources were already overstretched by business continuity, compliance, and renewal challenges—there has been an unquenchable demand from front-line enterprise departments for more applications. This is hardly surprising; the consumerization of IT made it plain to many businesspeople that the quality of the software they were being served up and asked to live with was far behind the curve of what companies like Google and Facebook were serving up to consumers for free. Information workers of the 1990s were frazzled by having to work late nights with spreadsheets, while fully aware that their databases were perfectly capable of achieving more in less time, and with less hassle.

Digital documents offer digital workers empowerment; that much is reasonably obvious: They don’t have to go to the IT department door with a begging bowl for new applications to work with data. What is less obvious, is how game-changing digital documents are for IT teams. While digital documents are convenient and accessible to the mass of workers in a digital business, for IT professionals with skills, there are no limits to the possibilities to innovate, whilst throwing a veil of robust IT protocols across the enterprise to improve control, data security, applications governance, replication, and scaling safeguards, etc.

Above all, digital documents form a thoughtfully designed balance between the needs of the business, and the needs of IT; one that favors both parties.