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Twitter Share to Linkedin Mang-Git Ng is the CEO of Anvil . The fastest way to build software for documents. The world is moving to be data-first, and organizations that fall behind in the transition risk losing significant competitive advantages and becoming extinct. Historically, organizations could rely on scale and Six Sigma operational principles to cement their leadership positions. But these methodologies are based on document-first technologies that are increasingly irrelevant, technologies like PDFs, printing, fax and email. Innovation in an industry was dependent on the ability of a company to break down processes into discrete tasks that could easily be accomplished by an individual. Examples include: • Insurance : Quoting, claims, underwriting and agent contracting—each has its own discrete processes and tasks. • Finance : Lending, banking and investing are all managed by separate departments with team members focused on a discrete specialized task. • HR : Recruiting, hiring, benefits administration and training are managed by different people within the HR department. When work is discretized, there is a need to standardize the communication stages. The solution is to use paperwork, more recently PDFs, as the communication glue. PDFs have allowed organizations to move faster than their physical world counterparts; however, in the internet age, PDFs have become a hindrance and less of an advantage. Google’s Surprise Update Just Made
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iPhone WWE WrestleMania 40 Results Winners And Grades From Night 2 Cena Undertaker And Everything That Happened After Cody Beat Roman At WrestleMania 40 In the near future, AI agents will handle most operational processes once managed by humans. No amount of lean methodologies can outpace the instant processing of a computerized, interconnected, data-first system. This means your organization needs to rethink your document processes. Moving To Data First As the internet matured, the foundation upon which work gets completed has shifted to the underlying data and not the vehicle (PDF document) on which the data resides. Fundamentally, the PDF is a human-readable representation of data that needs to be transferred between two parties. However, in an automated world, the instances where a human needs to “read” the data have been reduced to two critical moments: when a transaction is initiated and when the transaction is complete. Everything that happens in between is being automated away by software at an alarmingly fast rate (even faster with the onset of generative AI). Where the PDF breaks down is the inflexibility of the file format to interoperate with the online world that we live in today. Workarounds like optical character recognition (OCR) and robotic process automation (RPA) are eagerly being adopted by large corporations to squeeze out the final bits of operational efficiency, but the hefty expense of OCR and RPA limits the adoption of these systems to the largest incumbents in each industry. The middling success of these technologies is a direct result of the file format in which the technology is applied, the PDF. These technologies assume a future where we continue to rely on a facsimile of physical paper as the means for conducting business instead of a future that is data-first. The Competitive Advantage To be competitive, companies should focus on the transition from the past into the future. While large companies have reached success through operational excellence, continued success is not guaranteed in our fast changing technological landscape. Small companies can challenge the establishment by focusing on disrupting industries through the eager adoption of future technologies. But as history has shown, technological adoption is slow. The time in between is a blessing for incumbents to cement their leadership positions and a chasm many small companies do not succeed in crossing. Gaining the advantage in this transition requires one key insight: The transition to the future is a backward compatibility problem, not a technological advancement problem. Generally, the transition to a data-first world is described through a forward-looking progression. Physical paper will become PDFs, PDFs will allow for data extraction, and we will have the data for use in our modern computing systems. An alternative way to view the transition is to invert it. Let’s assume that data first is the future. How do we bring the laggards along? The future is going to be data-first, so we should create solutions that allow data to be represented on PDFs, and then printers can manifest PDFs into the physical world. From this perspective, we take data we already have and use it to create PDF documents the world still requires. If there is a need for a physical document, we can print it. But in the case where the receiving party is able to directly consume the data without the need for a PDF or physical paper, the data can be directly transmitted to the receiving party. Tooling In the transition to data first, many solutions exist to tackle different parts of the document process. There is OCR, RPA, document creation tools, e-signatures, shared drives, web form builders, spreadsheets, and more. The shortcomings of these solutions are their document-first orientation and lack of interoperability. Without a holistic solution, it will be very difficult to make more progress than small improvements on the document experience. One possible solution is a platform that provides all the pieces necessary to digitize a document process. When the pieces work together, from data collection to signed documents, it is much easier for each piece to communicate in a data-first fashion; documents simply become an output of the system, not the glue. Focus On The Transition To Data First The transition to a data-first world, while inevitable for many, is far from realized for most. The sheer amount of document-based bureaucracy is evidence of a long road ahead in this transition. Instead of placing moonshot investments on frontier technologies, focus on commercially viable technologies that can help you maintain or grow your advantage in the present. Winning this advantage gives your organization the privilege to compete another day. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify? Editorial Standards Print Reprints & Permissions