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Girish Balachandran, Head of Digital Media Business at Adobe India, spoke to BW Businessworld on the importance of digital document processes with the backdrop of hybrid work environments and challenges that Indian organisations face while undertaking adoption of these processes.
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How important are the digital document processes for organisations in India?
Post-pandemic, organisations have had to recalibrate their digital strategies to allow employees to remain productive even when working from home remotely. This is where digital documents and e-signatures play a crucial role.
Digital document workflows such as e-signatures help organisations reach a broader base of customers and prospects and achieve operational efficiency. Digitising certain document processes enables easier collaboration, guarantees better document security, and improves overall productivity.
According to the latest report by Adobe and Forrester Consulting, Indian organisations are increasingly realising the importance of digital document processes and e-signature capabilities. For 72 per cent of surveyed senior business leaders in India, digital document processes improved the ability to innovate by accelerating their document workflows.
In fact, many decision-makers at Indian organisations aim to increase their investment in digital document processes by 25 per cent over the next 12 months.
We are entering the era of hybrid work models. In this context, how does digital document processes factor in?
Hybrid working models are here to stay. In a hybrid work environment, knowledge workers constantly struggle with juggling between multiple devices, applications, and platforms to collaborate, which might adversely impact productivity. Having seamless and integrated digital document processes is key to mitigating these issues and improving overall productivity and efficiency.
Digital documents processes help stakeholders collaborate seamlessly and more effectively. As per the findings of the Adobe-Forrester study, digitising document workflows enables a hybrid working environment (66 per cent) and improved collaboration (68 per cent).
In a hybrid model, organisations need to reimagine the fundamental way of engaging and collaborating with stakeholders, both from an employee perspective and customer perspective. Here, technology can play a key role and help them digitise the entire customer journey, including the last mile in a secure and compliant manner.
Interestingly, for the surveyed senior leaders in the Adobe-Forrester Study, document sharing (76 per cent), document editing (72 per cent), and document process integration with everyday productivity applications (68 per cent) helped them achieve their business objectives.
How is cloud technology contributing to the wider adoption of digital document processes?
Cloud technology helps organisations be focused, agile and nimble. By embracing cloud, organisations can focus on delivering business impact rather than focus on infrastructure issues. Cloud technology helps organisations make document processes securely available across various surfaces, and platforms. Also, it helps save on real-estate costs for storing paper documents or on on-premises network storage & maintenance. Organisations working with Adobe Document Cloud are powered to create and collaborate on documents from anywhere, collect critical signatures with a click and do away with a lot of manual processes for good.
What are some of the biggest challenges for Indian organisations when it comes to digital document processes adoption?
Going digital is a journey best taken one step at a time, with clear goals and milestones mapped out. When we look at digital document process adoption, there are a few challenges that can come up: