Forced Change+Business Continuity

By Randy Weakly, CTO, ImageSource, Inc. 

When I used to think of “business continuity” I thought primarily of off-site backups and redundant servers. But the last couple of months have imposed unprecedented changes onto our global economic infrastructure forcing many organizations to scramble to adjust their workforce and even their entire way of doing business, including “business continuity”. Change is often scary and risky but when it’s forced upon us in an instant it can be crippling.

One huge change for many organizations is that their knowledge workers must now be enabled to work from any location and in some cases, from any device they can get their hands on. The same goes for their customers and partners. It is now obvious to most everyone that the mobile workforce and customer engagement technologies are no longer a nice-to-have but an absolute necessity

One of the best and easiest ways of enabling a remote workforce and customer/partner ecosystem is through the use of device-agnostic web forms or electronic forms. It’s pretty easy to throw a PDF form on your website but it’s not a very friendly customer experience, especially on a mobile phone. Additionally, the resulting PDF document creates downstream work as the inbound information, often with errors and omissions, must be transferred to a workflow or line of business system for processing. An eForm solution can easily be integrated into your existing website and provide input validations before the employee or customer even clicks the submit button. This validation can be applied not only to the information being typed into the various input fields but also to any required attachments. Even if you’re on a mobile phone, an eForm can attach photos of documents taken right from the device. These document photos can be processed by back end services so that you can’t tell the resulting image from one that came right off your scanner. Once the form validation is satisfied, the user is allowed to submit the form and it is immediately placed into an automated business workflow to be routed for human and/or programmatic processing based on the machine-readable input and business rules.

Another benefit of an eForms solution is the wide variety of input fields that can be used to create rich and engaging user experiences. Basic field types such as text, numbers, dates, email addresses, signatures, radio and checkboxes are staples. But more sophisticated eForms packages can provide aggregated inputs such as table data (think Excel spreadsheet), matrix choices, multipage forms with wizard options, file attachments with white/blacklist types, configurable size limits, password checking, and virus scanning, and much more. Combine these powerful auto-validating input fields with point & click dynamic field presentation logic, no-code web services integration, enterprise single-sign-on (SSO), and your custom theme library and you’ve got the tools to create your own online/mobile customer and employee engagement masterpiece!

One of our customer partners, Superior Court of California, County of Stanislaus detailed their success with ILINX platform and eForms here: https://tinyurl.com/y5yx7hbg

If we can be of any assistance to your organization please contact us at (360) 943-9273 or image@imagesourceinc.com