When the PDF will be a thing of the past

Anyone working in today’s business world is familiar with the Portable Document Format (PDF), and for good reason. PDFs offer a great convenience. They can be taken on the road, read on any device, emailed to other people and easily printed. They are cost-effective and environmentally friendly, saving print costs and paper. From a business perspective, the fixed layout also offers a certain level of security, knowing that the content is difficult to alter.

That said, the rise of sophisticated BI and analytic tools is changing how organisations operate and communicate. As users demand more and more out of their analytics, the ‘fixed-layout flat document’ begins to appear insufficient, losing its appeal. Today’s users want more than just static documents; they want to interact with the data contained within the documents. Today’s users demand an Analytical Document Format.

Large organisations have to distribute documents to many internal users on a daily basis. For example, think about account management. For a global organisation it’s not unusual to have 5000 or more account managers worldwide, many of whom are often on the road with limited or no internet access. They visit clients and have to review account details. Frequently they have to scroll through static PDFs, identify facts of interest and jot down calculations on old-fashioned notepads. In some cases, custom complex Excel sheets have been built to provide the desired interactivity. But those custom applications cost millions of dollars, and they’re prone to errors. An Analytical Document Format would offer businesses all of these important business functions, but without the inconveniences or costs.

One may argue that many of these interactive analytic functions are available online, so what advantage would an Analytical Document Format bring? What these documents can deliver that online functions can’t always promise is portability. In fact, it’s the ‘P’ in PDF that makes it so valuable, and that portability is a critical feature of the Analytical Document Format. It guarantees use anywhere — on a train, on an aircraft or in a park where there’s no internet connection. It’s unreasonable to assume that users will always be tapped into a Wi-Fi network. Today’s BI is mobile, and users want access to their analytics data from any location. This gives rise to the need for an Analytical Document Format that offers portability, interactivity, layout and print capabilities.

There’s no doubt that as users become more advanced, the demand for smarter documents will increase. We’ve already started to see the emergence of these types of collateral, and they’re already saving users money, providing more fact-based decisions through the organisations, and delivering more meaningful customer experiences. By the year 2020 I predict that the concept of Analytical Document Format will be far more mainstream and the old reliable PDF will be a thing of the past.

Rado Kotorov is Chief Innovation Officer for Information Builders, working with the Business Intelligence and the iWay product divisions. He has a PhD in Decision and Game Theory and institutional economics, and has published many papers and articles on business processes, emerging technologies, intellectual property rights, CRM, KM, innovation and entrepreneurship.

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