Digital White Papers

DOCUMENT FACTORIES: BUILDING DOCUMENT AUTOMATION TOOLS "intelligent" you can make the tool in terms of interpreting different inputs to generate different outcomes in the documents. •Questionnaire customization. Assess the extent to which you can customize the questionnaire (e.g., annotations, linking to external tools, formatting, etc.) and the ease of customization. •Guidance for end users. Determine the ability to provide guidance in the questionnaire and the flexibility in presenting that guidance (e.g., links to other resources, pop-up alerts, etc.). •Automated intelligence in building the questionnaire. Consider to what extent the development software can organize questions automatically that are conditional based on the answers to other questions. •Saving answers. In most cases, you will want to provide end users with the ability to save (and recall) answers entered into the questionnaire. •Answer files. End users will often want the ability to create a record of the answers entered into the questionnaire (e.g., a separate "answers-only" document). •Analysis of technical automation errors. Consider the extent to which the development software can identify problems or errors in how the document is automated (e.g., errors in the syntax for applying automation codes to the document, mismatches in the brackets used to identify variables and conditional text, incorrect variable usage, inconsistencies between the variables used in the document template and those that appear in the questionnaire, etc.). •Speed. Assess the speed with which the development software can analyze the template (i.e., the form with the automation codes) and publish the template to the server. The ability to analyze and publish templates rapidly can expedite the development process and be critical for the testing phase. •Grouping documents. The ability to group related documents easily (e.g., having a single questionnaire control multiple documents) and to build document hierarchies (i.e., connecting subgroupings of documents) can be critical if you are automating a group of related documents. •Viewing changes to the document in real time. The ability to view real-time changes to the document as the end user completes the questionnaire can facilitate testing and quality assurance in the development phase, and illuminate how choices in the questionnaire will affect the document, which could address initial skepticism about the efficacy of the tool and educate users as to the drafting implications of certain decisions. Some questions and any related guidance can be simplified if the end user can otherwise interpret the gist of the question by observing how the document is affected. •Concurrent manual changes to the document. The ability to make manual changes directly in the document (separate from changes effected by providing answers in the questionnaire) while going through the questionnaire allows for more customization of documents than might be enabled by the automation process alone. •Recurring use of document automation on different iterations of the same document. End users will sometimes want the ability to run document automation regarding a document that has been modified or prepared manually, so it differs from the automated template. This might be helpful when there is collaboration with parties outside your organization.

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