Having an intelligent forms platform can help your organization on its journey to digital transformation, but not all solutions are designed to meet your specific needs. In fact, many off-the-shelf forms applications lack the capabilities to develop complete end-to-end data collection forms that can solve everything from simple to complex business problems. These off-the-shelf applications might be good at designing web forms but can fall short at providing data processing functionality, forms management, forms access, data integrating and validation, and logic support.
Organizations may be captivated by the forms vendors’ ability to create glossy web forms and are led to believe they’re purchasing a complete forms package platform. To avoid this you should ask providers to answer some fundamental questions like:
- What happens to the discrete data once collected? Can it be validated?
- Can the data collected be routed?
- Can the platforms initiate a line of business workflow with the data collected?
- Can the forms be pre-populated with data from existing IT ecosystems?
- Can the content captured be handed off to a line of business application but with no sophisticated coding required to do so?
- How are paper and PDF forms use cases handled?
- And how are the forms exposed to the end users?
The answers to these questions will determine if your organization will need to make other significant investments in supplementary enterprise software, like BPM or middleware interface engines. This can also mean that your organization will be spending more money to acquire additional software and, additional project management time to implement.
Organizations should invest in forms solutions that are more suited to complete platform suites. A forms platform suite can address not just all the data collection use cases but also end-to-end processing of the data, and the management and exposure of the forms. Furthermore, a forms platform suite must be able to manage forms, provide access controls and facilitate a data process engine.
At OpenText™, we encounter organizations grappling with hybrid business processes, meaning that they are still handling paper forms while at the same time handling digital data collection. Many organizations have mature business practices, and change management has become the number one challenge in reaching a complete digital transformation across all areas of the enterprise.
It is important for organizations to do their homework and invest in technologies that rapidly adapt to the changing business and organizational challenges, but also quickly accelerate their digital transformation journey rather than slow it down.
OpenText™ LiquidOffice™ is an intelligent forms automation platform that enables organizations to design and publish rich electronic forms, automating data collection, routing and processing to digitally transform forms-driven line of business processes. Visit our website to find out how OpenText can help your organization with an intelligent forms automation platform.
