Modernizing Your Data Capture – Overcoming legacy restraints

We explored why an organization would want to improve their data capture but I am sure you feel there are issues that are impeding your business from being able to benefit from modernizing your organization's forms. Today I want to explore three of the most popular issues I have seen when discussing forms modernization with business and how to overcome them.

The most common reason for not being able to update a form is because it is a regulated document and that it must remain the way it is. Yes, there are many documents that must stay the way they are because there are legal requirements, specific processes and procedures around the document or the document needs to be included in a larger portfolio. Remember your document is not the same as your form. Documents are the final record of the data that was captured in the form. The way data is captured does not need to be done in the same fashion as it is displayed. This means that we can create a new form that benefits from modern design and best practices, which pushes content to the unchangeable regulated document.

Another very common issue is a required signature. Signatures themselves are an interesting topic that I will explore in more detail at a later date but at a high level there are tools that can be used to allow a user to sign a document digitally including signatures that need to be legally binding.

The last issue I want to explore that I also see come up often is that the form in questions is used in a larger workflow. For example, once the form is submitted the version is physically sent or stored somewhere. This has a similar solution as the first issue we looked at today, where we change the data capture for the user to be able to enter the data and then merge the collected data into a document that meets the expected requirements.