How To Get Started With Forms

This document helps to guide an organization in how to move forward with an Adobe Experience Forms solution for their organization.

Author: Angèle Taylor 

Form solutions are more complicated than they first appear. Typically, when people think about forms or documents they think of an 8 by 11 piece of paper. This is just a small portion of a forms process. To get the complete vision of a form solution you need to explore four main areas; data capture, data processing, data routing and lastly record keeping.

To be able to have management support for implementing a forms solution you must be able to demonstrate a quantifiable benefit to the organization. This can range from hard metrics like hours saved or direct cost savings or less tangible benefits like customer satisfaction and accessibility.

To build the case for your form solution, 4Point recommends starting with a data capture/ presentation by selecting a high value form within the organization now. This could be something that is used regularly or something that may not be used as frequently but is critical to the business process that would be used as a prototype for the organization to see, to use, to helpdemonstrate the benefits of moving forward with a complete forms solutions.

4Point recommends creating an adaptive form version of your high value form. Adaptive Forms allow for a single form template to exist and automatically adjust to the screen resolution making the form mobile ready out of the box.

This form would be stand alone, so not connected to any data or and workflow process. This allows the organization to see how the data capture portion of the business process could be improved without having to do the structural framework required to see the full benefit of an Adobe Experience Manager Forms solution.

From this you are also able to now more clearly see how data can be pushed into the form onload to personalize the experience based on the data being sent. This helps communicate how the number of forms can be reduced based on leveraging existing data.

Adobe Experience Manager, although fully capable of handling the end-to-end forms process, tends to be more impactful for organizations when integrated with other existing software solutions. Understanding the Adobe Experience Manager Forms can fill in the gaps.

Having a real form that people can see and interact with allows business to visually see the benefits that can be gained from modern form designs.

To be able to move forward with a complete forms solution you need to understand specifically what that means for your organization. Does that mean moving all your forms to the Adaptive Form format or leaving them in another format. What existing systems should be integrated with Adobe Experience Manager Forms and what are the responsibilities of each of these systems?

Once a strong understanding of the business objectives has been defined you can build out a strategic roadmap to mitigate technical debt while ensuring the prioritized items are being addressed in a timely fashion.