The Journey from Paper to Digital isn't rocket science, but you will need to buckle up!

Groot isn’t happy – it’s not hard to see why. Whilst so much of the Guardians of the Galaxy are high tech there are a whole heap of forms that need to be completed at the end of an adventure and it looks like he’s drawn the short straw, or pencil in this case. So he complains to his boss, Peter Quill (strictly speaking he says ‘I am Groot’).

Peter says ‘I have a plan…we’re going digital with our forms’. Does any of this sound familiar? Groot is anyone anywhere that’s had to fill out a form whilst Peter is a boss with a plan that’s only part of a plan.

In the next 2-5 years Office 365 and Dynamics users will become increasingly familiar with using digital forms in a business context delivered through the medium of PowerApps whether Canvas or Model Driven. We’ve all been effectively using digital forms for years, when we make an Amazon purchase, submit a tax return or even make an online payment. But there is a vast difference between being a submitter of data to being a creator of submission processes.

The journey from paper to digital has a number of twists and turns and in this article I’d like to indicate some of these. By all means add your own in the comments if you wish. I’m an Office 365 stack specialist myself, and whilst the tools I’m referring to will be based on this vendor the principles are valid irrespective of the technical solution.

So here are the things to consider when going from Paper to Digital :-

Know your Sponsor

Many Sponsors will believe that their involvement is to say ‘Please make this digital’. A digital form goes way beyond the confines of what is visible on the screen.  We’ll see later on that it includes having a full understanding of the user story and user journey through to its conclusion.

Sponsors must understand that they, or one of their subordinates, will need to be involved in the creation process and sign off at a range of points including agreeing the user stories, agreeing the fields, agreeing the workflow, agreeing the permissions, agreeing sharing of the solution, identifying testers, providing structured feedback, testing the product and signing off the product. In short, they will have responsibilities and if they don’t meet them they will end up with a suboptimal product and an inefficiently produced solution.

Sponsors use the digitisation process to correct all the issues that they have with their current processes

In principle this isn’t a problem, but it does make mapping out a solution more complex as it is no longer like for like and developers may not be able to liaise effectively with the intended users as they may not be aware of the vision of the sponsor.

Sponsors are not fully aware as to the possibilities provided by solutions

Any performant digital form will contain error trapping and a whole range of other possibilities ranging right up to using AI to enhance the user experience. If sponsors and users apply a paper forms mentality to a digitised form they are likely to end up with a distinctly average solution.

Developers are not fully aware as the possibilities provided by solutions

PowerApps, at the very least, is a relatively new technology providing the ‘final mile’ in business applications. Developers coming from a traditional coding background simply don’t know how it works. This is not to say that they cannot learn, however solutions will be bounded perceived or actual software limitations in addition to the creativity of the developer to create work arounds.

Where will users be completing the form?

Roughly speaking your internet connectivity may be a limiting factor in your new processes. If your users are not expected to have internet connectivity, there may be little point you digitising forms, depending on the solution you have of course. Performance without internet connectivity isn't a strong suit for PowerApps unless you're prepared to put a significant amount of dev time into the exercise.

What device will users be completing the form on?

Certainly, in the PowerApps canvas apps world you build apps for specific devices and whilst they will scale to other devices it is quite literally a scaling process. You need to be clear in your own mind what form factor you are expecting users to be using when consuming your forms.

Do you need a digital form?

It’s worth throwing in the fact that sometimes going digital may not be the answer.  This may be dependent on the skills of your users, the complexity of the proposed process, the scale of effort required and so on.

User stories

User stories are not always apparent when reviewing a paper form. You’ll need to take the time to elicit what the true users stories are, and get them agreed at a very early stage. Furthermore, when you think you’re done you should be referring back to these to confirm that you have achieved what was originally set out.

Wireframes

Sometimes hand-written wireframes may be an efficient way of getting stakeholders to think about what they are trying to build.

Design

Following on from the above you’re all designers now, with everything that goes with it. The low code no-code world is great, but if you have people that come from a coding background that want beautifully specified solutions for them to go complete it simply won’t work. Good design feels natural, with screens that are consistently and logically laid out that flow from one to the other in a sensible way. Bad design is entirely the opposite and the end result is an illogical mess that users will not feel confident in completing. Additionally, administrators may mistrust them, especially if they let through submission errors. Embrace the responsibility and go design amazing solutions.

Data permissions may be considered too late in the process

It is entirely possible in PowerApps, in particular where Sharepoint is used as the back end, to create solutions that appear to work effectively but that have permissioning gremlins that are found to be unacceptable for an enterprise level.  Agree these up front.

The user journey to the form is not fully considered

At many times building digital forms is reliant on all parties having empathy – putting themselves in the shoes of the user, the administrator or even the sponsor, each of which have different objectives.

To this end – have the users been communicated with? have you removed the old methods of submission? Have you created links to your software? Have you created help guides? Does your helpdesk even know any of this has been happening? Just remember that if you are trying to communicate a digitisation process as a journey to the New World, you had better make it all that you said it would be or your users will just revert to saved copies of pdf and excel spreadsheets and keep sending them across to your administrators.

No form is an island

Any form, however trivial, exists as part of a workflow. In my view the WHOLE workflow, within reason, should be digitised ensure bottlenecks are removed to produce a truly efficient process. There isn’t scope to go into this but clever use of the Flow, PowerApps and Power BI can deliver good, even excellent, value to your stakeholders.

Reporting

Invariably reporting will be a factor when building your forms. Firstly, you need to understand the scale of the reporting and then how you are going to resource this. Reporting can range from the trivial through to deeply complex modelling. The ease with which you are able to achieve this may depend on the quality of the data collected and its structure.

Data Architecture

The digital forms that you create should not exist in isolation but should, within reason, be consistent across all your digital forms. For example an organisation structure should be the same whichever form you select. Additionally, the data structures that you produce should be capable of existing and expressing themselves irrespective of the method you use to populate them.

Audit trail

Linked to the data schemas any system you build needs to be capable of being interrogated. To some extent this is independent of any app you produce, but quite often the app is the best means of expressing the audit trail in question.

Naming conventions

Whether this be within your applications (it is particularly relevant to PowerApps) or within your database, having sensible naming conventions that will allow your superusers/devs to have some hope of reading your solutions at a later date is important as quite often they lay the foundations for the construction of future solutions. Consequently any good work or errors can be magnified.

Training

There is no particular reason why your users, administrators or developers will know how to use, process or maintain your form. Furthermore, your helpdesk will also need to understand how they fit into the picture, so make sure that these stakeholders are incorporated into your thoughts.

GDPR considerations

The General Data Protection Regulations do not permit businesses to hold onto data for excessive periods. In a paper world there is a natural process of filing and archiving that, at the very least, ensures that forms effectively get subsumed into the business archives but data collected on individuals does not degrade in any way if it is not deleted. If you are developing apps within your organisation and you’re not considering the journey that your data will go on from cradle to grave you may be storing up issues that will need to be resolved at some point in the future by someone less familiar with the original process.

Disability Accessibility

Finally, with a paper form there is limited scope to ensure that users with a range of disability (physical and mental) to be able to use your solutions. It is extremely important to ensure at an early stage if this is important for your application as it does add a significant level of labour, even more so if added in retrospectively.

Concluding remarks

These aren’t, by any means, an exhaustive list of challenges when going from paper to digital, but hopefully they do indicate that any simplistic view of going digital will fall down very quickly. The consequence of this may be an under-resourced project that fails to meet the needs of the business or that does succeed, but only via a very costly process of backfilling and corrections. 

We all will need to get good at playing our part in any of these digitisation processes as whilst ERP systems will continue to fulfil our core business requirements a whole world of opportunity lies out there to modernise and reinvent our business processes that leads us on to new levels or organisational efficiency. Good Luck!

Rory Neary is an former chartered accountant now operating as a consultant specialising in using the Microsoft Power Platform delivering high levels of process efficiency and reporting insight to medium to large corporates.