Digital White Papers

42 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Developing a Document Assembly Platform That Works Vendor Selection, Staffing and Platform Design We now faced the task of moving the forms into a document assembly technology platform. Our familiarity with HotDocs due to a long- standing relationship, the product's maturity, its standing in the market and the cost of moving to another product made HotDocs the clear choice for our needs. HotDocs offers consulting services, but a project can cost well over $100,000 if completely outsourced. With no guarantee of success, we did not want to take on this level of financial risk. We were also reluctant to hand over control and were concerned that an outside consultant would lack the requisite knowledge to develop the components, templates and interviews. Conversations with knowledge management professionals whose firms had completely outsourced platform development suggested that this approach carries high risks of delay, cost overruns and even failure. We seled on a hybrid approach: I would serve as lead programmer and purchase consulting support as needed. I completed HotDocs's 16-hour training program and developed the platform's skeleton with simple one-to-two-page template forms, engaging HotDocs to review my work and provide feedback to ensure that the basic structure and programming style conformed to best practices. The Building Blocks The basic elements of any document assembly platform are components, templates and interviews. Each must be carefully designed with the end-user experience and system needs in mind. Components are used to create variables within templates and are also the building blocks of interviews and computations. For each component, many configuration decisions must be made at the start of development to avoid complications down the road. For instance, you must decide whether a component should: » Be a text field, be a single-selection drop down or allow multiple selections » Have a default value » Be associated with any training resources » Apply default formaing (e.g., capitalization) to the data entered or selected » Be integrated with any other firm information system By designing the components ourselves, we could make these decisions quickly. In the end, we created more than 700 components for our platform. Template development is equally complex. A programmer designing templates may discover elements in the underlying forms that were underdeveloped (such as a form that includes two options when three are needed) and require additional draing. Likewise, the intersection of seemingly simple components and variables may present programming challenges. Certain parts of our templates needed more than four times the amount of code than in the original language; one of our more complex forms required more than 120 thousand characters of code. 94 percent believe the platform helps them draft documents faster.

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