denotes premium content | Feb 8 2012 
Feature
posted 11 Sep 2006 in Volume 3 Issue 3
Cover story
Forms and function
The new breed of e-form is more flexible, more dynamic and more responsive to the needs of end-users than its predecessors. But in order to live up to that promise, tight integration with back-end systems using XML is a prerequisite.
By Jessica Twentyman
When Daniel Mimnagh started work as electronic forms project manager at the London Borough of Hackney in August 2005, the challenge he faced was clear from the start. The council had already deployed two types of electronic form (‘e-form’) on its website – but with only limited success.
The first type – downloadable forms – required residents to download a PDF or Word document from the council’s site, print it out, complete it offline and return it to the council by fax or post. At council offices, the information was painstakingly re-keyed into back-office systems and processed.
It was hardly the epitome of 21st century organisation. Not only was this inconvenient for residents and time-consuming for staff, but it also failed to meet the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) requirement for the 100 per cent online delivery of services.
The second type of e-form, meanwhile, was generated by a complicated, bespoke system. Since users of that system needed to be proficient in web mark-up languages in order to design and deploy new forms for Hackney’s website, the process of creating them was far too slow. In addition, because these forms did not actually integrate with any of Hackney’s back-office systems, it was impossible to track their progress.
Clearly, a strategic re-think was required. In fact, Mimnagh could see that without one, Hackney was likely to miss a number of key government targets.
But, the situation was not quite as desperate as it sounds. In the last six weeks of 2005, the London Borough of Hackney produced and deployed over six hundred e-forms on its website, using software from e-forms specialist Ebase Technology.
Mimnagh is delighted. “I already had experience of developing e-forms for another council, where it used to take three days to develop an e-form and integrate it with a database,” says Mimnagh. “With Ebase, we can build and integrate fifteen forms in just one day,” he adds.
But more importantly, the software integrates those e-forms tightly with Hackney’s customer relationship management (CRM) and its business process management (BPM) systems, both from Microsoft. That means that data captured on e-forms can automatically be fed into these systems, triggering further steps in any business process.
Now, for example, when a resident completes a form on the Council’s website, they are supplied with a unique number. The data on the form they have submitted is extracted by the Microsoft BizTalk BPM system and a case is created in the CRM system. The service request will be automatically triggered in the appropriate back-office applications. Once that service has been delivered, the completion of the job is logged in the back-office system, the CRM system is updated and the case closed.
Throughout the process, the resident is able to track the progress of their request online, using their unique reference number.
“The key criterion for our choice of product was how well it could handle integration with our other systems. Only when you have full integration with back-office systems does citizen self-service really become efficient,” says Mimnagh.
The integration imperative
Like the London Borough of Hackney, many organisations have discovered only through trial and error that integration can make all the difference between the success and failure of an e-forms project.
Others have not even got that far and have yet to explore e-forms in any serious way, says Gartner analyst Toby Bell. To some extent, that may be the fault of e-forms software suppliers. “As many as 85% of business processes depend on forms and electronic counterparts (e-forms) can yield significant benefits,” he says. “Nevertheless, few companies know about the potential benefits of e-forms because vendors have only recently assembled the capabilities needed to tie e-forms to business processes.”
These new ‘capabilities’ owe much to a shift in the kind of technology used to underpin e-forms, from hypertext mark-up language (HTML) to the more sophisticated extensible mark-up language (XML).
When e-forms first emerged, the primary goal was simply to replicate a paper form on a computer screen using HTML. That, proponents argued, would help to eliminate paper forms and their associated storage and management costs – and for many, it did.
Now, says Forrester Research analyst Barry Murphy, the goalposts have shifted and the demands placed on e-forms have widened to include process management and efficiency. “As processes become more automated, organisations should think of forms as more than a user interface to capture information from end users. It is also possible to utilise e-forms functionality in richer interactions with customers.”
That kind of dynamic user experience is only possible, however, where forms are ‘intelligent’ – that is to say, where the information can be verified, to some extent, before it is shared with back-end systems. That creates a symbiotic relationship. Information entered on an e-form can be fed directly into relevant back-end systems.
And, in reverse, e-forms can feed off these back-end systems, pre-populating certain fields depending on the information the user has already entered. “For example, an employee filling in a holiday request form might begin by entering their employee number. The form will then be able to display how many days off they have left this year. If they put in more days than that, the e-form will display an error message, explains Ben Richmond, managing director of enterprise content management (ECM) system integration specialists, the Content Group.
“In this way, a true e-form can be a point of guidance to the person filling it out. Dynamic forms interact directly with the user, giving advice and making suggestions based on a mixture of known information and computer-based intuition,” he says.
To date, HTML-based e-forms have fallen rather short of this ideal. The language is a cumbersome medium for graphic design and layout, an important consideration when an organisation might be dealing with a forms-averse or impatient target audience.
And while HTML may be the ‘lingua franca’ formatting language of the web, it is not necessarily an easy fit with many back-office applications which feed on form-generated data. HTML may be a means of presenting information, but it does not tell users, or computer systems, what the information is or how it could be used.
Enter XML
XML, by contrast, is a better choice. XML is a text-based markup language that adds metadata to text information and, in some cases, binary data. Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, it provides a simplified but formal subset of structured general markup language (SGML) that eases the exchange of structured data between web applications by pre- serving the SGML features of validation, structure, and extensibility. XML does not replace HTML, but instead serves as a complement to HTML when structured data is involved.
As a result, while HTML remains a useful tool for storing and exchanging small, unstructured documents, XML provides a means of exchanging large amounts of structured data across the internet and over networks in general. XML transforms web-based documents into interactive, re-usable documents, with tags describing the content of the document and assigning roles to the data – thus transforming words into searchable information.
As such, XML is robust enough to launch workflow and process-driven applications. Not only that, but XML-based forms technologies make it possible to deliver the same content to any kind of end-user device, from standard PCs and laptops to handheld computers and mobile phones, without any loss of functionality for the end user.
Most of the main e-forms software providers have adopted XML, bolstering it with additional features that extend its value. Two such public languages, for example, are XML Forms Architecture (XFA), originated by JetForm (now owned by Adobe) and Extended Forms Description Language (XFDL), developed by PureEdge (now owned by IBM).
But each vendor supports XML differently, warns Murphy of Forrester IBM’s XDFL, for example, is a forms design and document processing meta-language that not only dynamically drives forms presentation from multiple schemas, but also guarantees that a form does not change from inception to receipt. Adobe’s XFA template, meanwhile, acts as a container for data capture, presentation and manipulation rules that apply to any and all form instances created from that template. Microsoft’s approach is similar, while
Either way, all are unanimous in their opinion that integration is the key to a truly productive e-forms environment. “Business processes begin and end with the collection and presentation of structured information, so e-forms have an enormous role to play in effective management of processes. But they can only play that role if they seamlessly integrate with other systems and applications,” says Doug Coombs, product marketing manager at FileNet.
E-forms in action
Whatever their approach, these vendors – and many others – claim that, for customers, the new breed of e-form is quickly becoming the vital ‘first step’ in business processes that touch almost every department in their company – as well as those of their key partners.
In the US State of Washington, for example, death certificates can now be filed online – typically by funeral directors, with doctors, medical examiners and coroners providing information about the cause and manner of death. In the past, by contrast, funeral directors had to rely on manual certificate preparation, involving personal delivery of records to doctors for signature, extensive and costly travel to file certificates, and labour-intensive processing of paper records locally and at state Vital Records offices.
Using IBM’s Workplace Forms product as an electronic death registry (EDR) system front end, all parties involved in the issue of a death certificate in the State of
In
Allocating drugs to clinical investigators, meanwhile, is very form-intensive. A medication request submitted to Merck by an outside clinical investigator can trigger, for example, up to four processes in addition to the original order: the official release, the shipping notice, the delivery and the confirmation of receipt.
More recently, Merck has implemented the Adobe Intelligent Document platform. This enables its e-forms to interact directly with its Oracle-based trial-management system, the company’s EMC Documentum ECM system and its SAP enterprise resource planning system. In total, Merck has created more than 100 intelligent forms, which are accessed by about 300 users worldwide via the Merck intranet.
Like Merck, many companies find that e-forms need to be tightly integrated with their ECM environment. Merck’s vendor, Adobe, provides packaged integration to EMC Software’s Documentum suite, along with the products of most of the other main ECM software suppliers. Rival companies, have their own ECM offerings and their e-forms products are optimised for their respective ECM platforms.
Forrester’s Murphy points out, forms represent a transactional record and may be subject to stringent retention requirements. “It’s important that an e-forms product fit with an organisation’s existing ECM environment, where the versions of a form can be managed and records policies can be applied,” he says.
For information management professionals, therefore, the e-form represents a big opportunity, but also an enormous challenge. It has become a crucial content element that can drive business processes and provide evidence for how those process have been conducted. But the e-form can only do achieve those tasks if it is tightly knitted into the surrounding IT infrastructure.
E-form architecture
E-form technology from suppliers such as IBM/FileNet, Adobe, Microsoft and Cardiff Software (now owned by Autonomy) typically consist of the following elements:
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E-form designer
A client-based tool that defines not only the ‘look and feel’ of the form, but also logic, data call-outs, processing instructions and so on. The design specifies all text components, images and/or branding information, and defines (with processing functions) where a back-end application or a person should enter new data.
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E-form client for user entry
Essentially a delivery mechanism and rendering tool, this application presents the form with provisions for different ways of accessing, completing and modifying it – such as for web, mobile or offline users.
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E-form processor
This integrates with back-end applications and databases, automates e-form routing and data callouts, and executes process logic.
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E-form generation
A processor generates an e-form by populating the template with referenced text (which may be determined by business rules) and content pulled from a database to fill in fields of the template and generate content (such as the date), and defines components where users input information. The rules embedded in user entry fields can identify data type, data extent (for example, five versus nine digits) and include code to test data (such as entry matches account number).
Product evaluation criteria
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Forms design interface
Does the product have an interface that allows non-programmers to create form templates, including definition of metadata for form presentation, content, structure and behaviour?
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Forms deployment (distribution and access)
Can forms be made accessible to users in required formats and managed within a company’s IT environment?
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Forms processing (submission/ingestion)
What options exist for submitting/accepting both electronic and paper forms?
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Architecture and platform
Is there support for the common platforms and standards-based architectures that large enterprises need?
A new approach for SMEs?
John Jarvis, managing director of Evenlogic, claims his company can offer smaller organisations with significant budgeting constraints a relatively cost and pain-free answer to the challenge of e-forms –in particular, charities and professional bodies.
The company has launched a new electronic forms service that enables the online completion and submission of PDF forms using Adobe Acrobat Reader. This service enables Evenlogic clients to place electronic versions of their PDF forms on a web server, enabling users to complete, edit and save the forms to the web server using their own version of Acrobat Reader from within their web browser window.
That solves a common problem typically associated with the PDF format, says Jarvis. “Under normal circumstances, when Adobe Reader is used on its own, data in PDF forms cannot be saved to a user’s PC halfway through. So if a user logs off, they have to start filling out the form from scratch when they log on again,” he says.
Of course, Adobe has already addressed this issue. In recent years, it has poured millions of research and development dollars into defining its XML Data Package (XDP) standard, which enables files to be described and rendered as either PDF or XML documents as required, as well as its Intelligent Document Platform suite, which allows a common set of services and permissions to be applied to documents before delivery to the client as an electronic or printed document.
But, according to Jarvis, Adobe’s Intelligent Document Platform is “pitched at large corporates with big budgets – and Adobe purposely keeps the price of enabling forms that way quite high, certainly too high for the kinds of organisations Evenlogic works with.”
He may have a point. Adobe’s Intelligent Document Platform is a suite of products and server-side elements of that suite can start at as much as $65,000 per CPU (central processor unit).
The Evenlogic eForms server, by contrast, runs in conjunction with more economically priced, commodity software products: it runs on the Microsoft IIS web server and can integrate with a Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases. But this is also a less technically-sophisticated approach that will not support full end-to-end, XML-enabled business process management.
For some, however, the Evenlogic approach is enough. Several customers, including the Rugby Football Foundation, the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust and the
