Adobe Validates E-Forms

by Doug Henschen

Adobe has seen the future of business transactions and it is the electronic form. With its February 1 bid to buy Accelio, the Ottawa-based company formerly known as Jetform, Adobe offered $72 million (in a stock swap) to gain a commanding share of the e-forms system market. While the acquisition was not completed at press time, the deal was expected to go through in March 2002.

Does the entry of Adobe, a $1.2 billion company, mean that this market's time has finally come? Adobe and others are forecasting dramatic sales increases, yet Accelio, the market leader, had been suffering losses and sales declines.

Electronic forms have been available for years through messaging products such as Lotus and Exchange. Yet these tools have replaced only a tiny fraction of the cumbersome, paper-based processes out there in business and government. Part of the reason is that e-forms alone aren't much better than paper.

"An e-form is only the beginning of a business process, not the end," says analyst Steve Weissman, president of Kinetic Information of Waltham, MA. "E-forms can be a gateway to applications, but the important part is getting the data where it needs to go." And data delivery, concludes Weissman, demands integration with workflow and applications.

Whether it's fear of integration and development costs, loathing of ongoing administration or just plain inertia, far too many paper treadmills have hung on for far too long.

While I wouldn't expect sensitive transactions such as medical claims to rapidly migrate to e-forms anytime soon, plenty of transactions still take place inside the firewall that should be e-ready. Human resources, requisition and internal accounting processes are good examples.

"The stumbling block with e-forms has always been IT," says Patrick Ward, vice president of consulting services at Cardiff Software, an Accelio rival based in Vista, CA. "IT departments don't want to get caught up in creating and revising forms, changing workflows and administering these systems."

Cardiff has responded by focusing its system on turning business users into e-form creators and contributors. This sounds like the "webmaster bottleneck" issue, but you won't hear content management vendors using the word "e-forms." Broadvision of Redwood City, CA, for one, talks about replacing manual processes with efficient online self service.

Perhaps the broadest penetration of e-forms into corporate and government processes has been through simple technologies rather than e-form suites and e-business systems. HTML, active server pages, Java server pages and even Adobe's Acrobat product have been used by many with little fanfare. When routing, approvals and integration are required, these technologies often fall short, but at least they're a start in replacing cumbersome paper processes with more efficient digital alternatives.

Doug Henschen, Editor-in-Chief

Send questions or comments to dhenschen@cmp.com