The Evolution of Document Composition

Document creation software has been evolving since the 1970's. Originally document creation or composition software was essentially a piece of code that sat upon a mainframe and attached to transactional business applications on the mainframe.

The documents that these systems produced were functional, that is probably all you can say about them. Developing document creation applications within these systems was time consuming and demanded an awful lot of code. However what may surprise you is the number of applications out there still running on these systems!

During the 1980's, we started to see an advance in the document creation arena. Systems became easier to work with and the notion of bringing some variable data in for select marketing messages began to appear. The advent of the PC began to bring software tools in the document management arena. Notably, imaging and work flow and letter creation tools.

However compared to today, computing power was still relatively low, Windows had not really emerged as a dominant operating system and the tools that companies were using to generate documents remained fairly rigid and certainly demanded a heavy skill set to create new document creation applications.

With these tools, the process of getting a new document to market was long and fairly arduous requiring much IT input and much liaison and dialogue between the business and IT. Thus once an application was built, it was likely to remain fairly static.

Then came the 1990's. Windows was in ascendancy and the concept of GUI (Graphical User Interface) tools began to emerge. WYSIWIG (What you see is what you get) began to make an entrance into the field of document creation and composition. Now, users of moderate skill and IT literacy could begin to take some control over the look and feel of the documents.

A large portion of the scripting has now been removed from the document application development process. The scripting that was required now was related to document business rules - what salutation to use, if variable x on the document equals y then show this wording etc.

Whilst this advance was significant, we certainly couldn't call the document creation process dynamic. There is still a lot of need for IT Project Management discipline and a document could not  simply be turned around in a day. Thus, customer communications management projects remained fairly un-dynamic and a sudden change in market conditions might induce a delayed reaction in customer communications documents.

What did begin to emerge towards the end of the 1990's was the advent of business user messaging software. Now, a user in marketing could add a marketing message hours before a statement run was due to be produced and that message would hit customer letter boxes the next morning.

From 2000 on, things really began to take off. More and more control was pushed in the users direction. The ability to drive communications to customers became a task of the business. Convergence of other document management tools such as archival and retrieval tools meant that the business of creating documents was moving from being a service function to an active, live and dynamic value provider.

Customer service functions began to notice benefits. Higher quality documents mean fewer calls into the call centre. The ability to view customer documents online through web browsers meant that customers were served more effectively and quickly. Call centre productivity was rising.

In the last 5 years, the push to be able to communicate via any channel with relevant content has grown significantly. Today, document creation is the means that a company communicates with its customers, prospects and suppliers.

The ability to deliver documents as paper, email, sms, web, to social media, using XML documents to interface with suppliers efficiently, to be able to communicate customers on a one to one basis means that document creation starts involves advanced data management, marketing process and input, sophisticated distribution and technology explotation.

Today, Document Creation drives sales, improves company efficiency, increases customer loyalty, share of wallet and numerous other key performance indicators. Document creation can live and breathe with an organisation and gives organisations a competitive advantage that competitors not equipped with the right technology simply can't succeed against.

Document Creation is about knowing your customers. It is about setting up an ongoing dialogue with those customers, tempting them to tell you a little more about themselves each time they interact with you. It is about developing a focus, about creating individual customer value.