Never mind Slack or Yammer
or all the other new ways of talking to each other – for a lot of
people the business world still runs on documents and forms. And whether
they're paper or email attachments, they're not easy enough to fill out
on tablets and smartphones. Adobe is trying to change this with its new Document Cloud
– new versions of the Acrobat PDF software for different devices, and
cloud services that make all those forms and documents easier to work
with, without needing to go back to your desk.
"The multi-device
environment has created all these amazing opportunities but it has also
confounded people," Adobe's Mark Grilli told TechRadar Pro. "We can't go
back to a simpler world where the only way we get work done is at the
desktop, whether that's the fax machine or email attachments. There's a
'come into this century' momentum happening, but it's not easy enough.
Everyone has a smartphone now and I can't tell you how many times I get
the confounded look from someone saying 'I have this form and I don't
know what to do'. Right now, a lot of common currently used technologies
and approaches fall down when you're not doing things in a particular
way."
Documents are still the way business is done, he points out.
"There's a very large business in delivering overnight envelopes; we
spend millions of dollars on it. And their sole purpose, apart from
maybe some where you send a DVD with content to save on bandwidth, is
that it's a lot of contracts, agreements – things to be signed.
"The
volume of effort spent on just simple approvals and signatures is
enormous – think about a design agency getting sign-off on creative
work. That's a very labour intensive process. Or the architect on a
remodel sending the floorplan for the company building or the
specifications of a design for manufacturing. There's an enormous number
of things that are built on those technologies from, at best, fifteen
or twenty years ago." View and fill out forms on your phone with Adobe Document Cloud
Making life easier
Some
of the tools in Document Cloud are about making all this easier, like a
new feature in Acrobat that lets you take a photo of a form with your
phone or tablet, tap on the places you need to fill in details and then
sign with your finger. That helps in terms of productivity and customer
experience.
Others, like simple workflow or integration with
SharePoint, are about getting documents and forms to the right place –
and knowing where they are. "These are binding legal documents. How many
non-disclosure agreements has your business signed and is subject to
and they're sitting in a salesperson's trunk so you don't know about
them?"
The productivity side is highlighted by a recent IDC study,
he says. "People said a third of their time is spent on admin tasks and
two-thirds on real work. That's a day and a half a week spent on doing
things you don't consider valuable." (The study also said 61% of people
would change jobs just to do less paperwork).
And customer
satisfaction is set to become a competitive advantage, Grilli believes.
"If you're my co-worker and I send you something to deal with and you
get it on your phone, then I can expect you to figure it out. That's
your job, although you shouldn't have to figure it out, because there
are these more modern approaches. But if I'm a sales professional and I
need you to sign this sales agreement so I get my commission, I need to
make sure you can do it. I can't just leave you to figure it out."
His
bank recently made a mistake and turned off one of his accounts. "I
have three other accounts with them, so they have my information, but to
fix that account I had to reply with a paper form. That was somehow
accepted practice, but it made me want to leave the bank."
Documents are one of the last bastions of these old ways of working.
Web conferencing means you don't have to travel for a meeting just to
show someone a presentation. Even market stalls use credit card swipe
systems like Square so they don't lose customers. Grilli thinks having
to post a form off to someone is about the go the same way.
"What
will make companies change their minds is that they're going to start
losing customers and they'll realise one reason business is slowing down
is that competitors are doing things better, faster, cheaper. What
we're hearing from customers is not, 'How does digital signing for
documents work?' or 'Is that even legal?' – it's 'What's the best
practice that someone else is doing that I need to worry about?'"
Making
it easy to work with documents on the devices you want, including
filling out and signing forms, can improve both employee productivity
and customer satisfaction. "Often the problem is that the company
systems don't talk to each other and the burden of making them talk to
each other falls on me – or you put it on the customer. A connected
customer experience is at the centre of all these things and that gets
you the competitive advantage of customer support." Use your finger – or a pen if your tablet has one – to put a legal signature on a form without ever needing paper
No big hassle
The
idea with Document Cloud is to give you slicker tools you can pick up
straight away but that can also fit in with what you already use. "We're
deliberately not going the route of you having to rethink your entire
platform to make it happen," Grilli explains. "If you want you can be up
and running in minutes. Or you can, if you want to, figure some custom
workflow and that would take maybe a week."
"We have a customer
that is stuck using SharePoint. They have a lot of workflows, but the
way they're using it, SharePoint hasn't enabled things to go outside of
their company. Our ability with a few days' worth of setup to say 'I'm
going to grab this file and make something happen and then put it back'
has transformed these systems that they were viewing internally as
something they had got to replace, but it would be really expensive and
it would take six months or two years to do that, into something that
can do what they need now."
