The Evolution Of Forms: The Bound Era

The Bound Era is where advancement in forms lost pace with emerging technologies. Technology was moving so fast and what we defined a form as, just couldn’t keep up. Thanks to the previous Industrial era forms have been trapped into an 8 by 11 standardized box that our business operations demanded. As business rapidly expanded forms needed to move quickly too. Forms? needed to be consistent for mass production and business operations but this uniformity made forms very rigid preventing forms to properly adapt to allow for emerging technologies.

In the 1990’s people started talking about data, data lakes, big data and removing data silos; some organizations attempted to leverage these ideas by integrating their forms with the existing data repositories but the problem here was planning. Business quickly rushed in to trying to capture and store data that they didn’t properly define how the data would be stored and how the data would speak to the forms let alone across the organization itself.

Omnichannel was the next big idea around 2010; the idea of having a seamless experience across all channels, in person, mobile online, but how could this be attained by forms? Again, not enough time was put into the foresight of implementing this new concept, so it was hacked together. Many organizations just created multiple standalone versions that needed to be maintained if they were even able to offer a rendition for the specific channels at all.

In 2020 we had the global COVID -19 pandemic. This helped push forms away from manual and print but because of the urgency to become digital forms were not properly transformed. Most forms were scanned and uploaded as images that people could print at home and as for the manual process behind the forms that were automated but it was yet again a hack job of it works just; just don’t look at it to closely.

AI has been in the works for years, but it was 2023/2024 where AI became the hot topic in organizations. I regularly am asked how can AI be leveraged with my forms because of the pressure from upper management needing some sort of a plan to implement AI so that their business doesn’t get left behind. The honest truth, is that forms in their current state now are not ready for AI. We need to go back and clean up the mess we built out over the years to properly be able to train AI let alone be able to take advantage of the full benefits as the technology continues to mature.

All that said we have tried to transform our forms to quickly without consideration of future proofing and we are now paying the price for it. We are in a place where the demands we have for our forms is not keeping up with what our forms can do. A change must be made to our forms just like we moved from clay to paper, paper to standardization, standardization needs to adapt into something more malleable.