“Despite more than 30 years of mainstream use of office authoring tools, not much has changed. Increasingly, enterprises deliver documents to customers in forms that aren’t fit for purpose. The next decade will reveal new cloud-native, data-driven, and structured approaches to document authoring.”
Forrester, The Future Of Documents, December 2020.
Wow! At Fonto we fell silent for a while reading the introduction of Forrester’s Future of documents report earlier this year.
For years now we’re helping companies in different verticals to create, edit and review documents that are fit for purpose. And for a long time, we’ve felt like a lone voice crying in the wilderness. But not anymore…
The mental model of paper
Principal analyst Cheryl McKinnon and her colleagues did a fantastic job describing a slow and disruptive development that’s taking place. While most of us are still trapped by the mental model of paper — pages, folders, and files, we’re slowly moving from documents to data. Data that are fit for purpose i.e. machine-readable.
In a world full of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), we still see well-educated people copying and pasting data from one system to another, or from PDF to Word and back to PDF again. Not just in pharma, standardization, finance, and legal – it happens everywhere, and all the time. It’s super inefficient but we’re used to it – and we’re not very fond of change – so we carry on. And on…
Garbage in, garbage out
As Forrester puts it: “Document authoring is ready for its moment of disruption.” According to the report “both technical and business decision-makers report frustration with current authoring tools and processes when trying to address specific communication and documentation requirements.”
Even though we have AI, ML, and the next big thing in tech to support us, at Fonto we believe in GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. So no more garbage in, please! When you structure and semantically enrich your content at the source, the output will be fit for purpose.
We’re happy to share Forrester’s Future of documents report with you. Let’s challenge that mental model! It might save you some time…