The theme for this conference can be captured best in a quote from the Harvard Business Review: “Of the $1.3 trillion that was invested in digital transformation in 2018, $900 billion has been wasted” $900 billion wasted. That’s a lot of money. Sadly, we have been here before: in the late 1990s into the early 2000s, huge IT investments were made in ERP systems, CRM systems… and a lot of those investments under-delivered. One might think we would learn from such an experience but in many cases, we are just repeating history. A recent Oliver Wyman report entitled “WHEN VISION AND VALUE COLLIDE: The State Of The Financial Services Industry 2020” predicts a conflict between people with the vision mindset and people with the value mindset. When the value mindset dominates the thinking within firms, the result is many small changes with known but low-impact outcomes. When the vision mindset dominates, aggressive amounts of spending can go into transformation efforts that don’t yield results -- perhaps not for years, perhaps not ever.

So what we wanted to emphasize in this conference is that while Vision is important – there is no creation of the future without vision – we also need to live in reality. And in business, reality demands a return on investment. And this means that one should apply DX technologies in a way that improves an important process that can deliver material value. The key to success is to understand your objectives before formulating a digital transformation strategy -- and to avoid bringing in the technology until you have gone through all of these exercises. Once you have a clear objective and create a strategy, only then should you begin to develop the tactics needed to achieve each goal. And then the tactics will determine the technology. The technology fit will be determined by the tactics and the strategy. All too often technology replaces strategy.

Three trends in customer communication have now converged: one is the need to comply with regulations: privacy regulations, accessibility regulations, SEC regulations, etc. This is vital for obvious reasons. A second is digital transformation (DX). And the third is customer experience (CX). For some verticals -- insurance and finance, for example -- the customer-facing document is the essential tool through which your customers experience your brand. Creating documents that are easy to understand, concise, colorful, full of useful information, universally accessible and omnichannel is a smart way to deliver a great customer experience.

And so digital tools that consolidate your 360 view of the customer, tools that create visually attractive customer-facing documents, tools that deliver these documents in a universally accessible way via whatever channel the customer prefers is a good use of time and energy. These are investments that yield value. So where DX meets CX there is material value. You can call it CCM – Customer Communication Management – you can use AI and analytical tools, you can use RPA, AR, all kinds of things – but at the end of the day, improving the customer communication process delivers value. That is what this virtual conference is about.

• Turn Vision into Reality kicked off with Sheri Byrne-Haber, the Head of Accessibility for VMware, presenting a session called The Flexible Will Survive. In the session, Sheri introduced the history of accessibility, discussed some keystone cases, showed examples of guidelines in action and spoke about the importance of empathy. The ADA Section 508 is an important consideration for anyone putting information out to the public, but especially those with ties to the government. We followed this excellent session up with a short case study: the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recently chose DocBridge solutions to help them assure universal accessibility to important tax documents. This track 2 session conveyed the innovation of our software and the creativity of our professional services team in crafting a solution to this issue.
• Harald Grumser, Founder and CEO of Compart AG, discussed coming trends in a session entitled Now that We Understand Digitization, What Comes Next. In this session, Harald showed why he is a visionary in the industry. We are seeing the extensive automation of all document-relevant processes. The basis for this is structured, consistent and centrally available data. Yet unstructured data -- in the form of photos, audio files and videos as well as presentations and text documents -- will grow disproportionately, according to the market research institute IDC by an average of 62 percent annually. By 2022, this data type is expected to account for around 93 percent of the total volume.
• Currently, companies are looking for truly efficient solutions to convert unstructured data into structured data. They face a number of challenges, ranging from the question of geographic location, the type of data storage and governance, to securing and analyzing this information in local and cloud environments. So it is hardly surprising that the MIT Sloan Group classifies 80 percent of all data as untrustworthy, inaccessible or not analyzable. IDC estimates that by 2020 the "digital universe" will contain up to 37 percent of information that could be valuable if analyzed.

• We followed this session with a practical look at our conversion hub technology, which is just now becoming available in the States. The conversion of mixed format, mixed typed, structured and unstructured documents into something quite usable: PDF, PDF/A, PDF/UA was the subject of this conversation.
• This session was followed by a session on PDF delivered by the chairman of the PDF Association, Mr. Matt Kuznicki. The session, entitled What You Miss When You Think of PDF as a Replacement for Paper really drove home the innovation that we are seeing from Adobe and other companies we work with in the PDF Association. This well-received session was followed up by three sessions about the practical uses of and delivery of DocBridge technology. Two of our customers, one relatively new (Paychex) and one that we have been working with for over a decade (IWCO) discussed how they use our DocBridge Delta solutions in their workflow and how delivery options have made it easier to deploy. Our colleague Francois Charette, Chief Software Architect, followed with a session on using containers and kubernetes to deliver technology in a cost-effective and small IT footprint way.
• Compart CMO Thorsten Meudt then returned to discuss another case study, this one about how one of the most famous sports franchises in the world is using DocBridge Impress to deliver omnichannel communication to their raving fans.
• And, speaking of sports, the day-long conference concluded with an energetic, entertaining session by the incomparable Ross Bernstein, whose session Winning with Integrity put a beautiful bow on a tremendous conference.