Global Information Governance Day: Latest Trends and PDF

Note: you will find a summarized version of this article on the PDF Association website.

Today is Global Information Governance Day.
Since 2012, this initiative has been celebrated worldwide on the third Thursday of February. Its purpose is to raise awareness of information governance and how companies and organizations manage their information.

This vast topic indeed covers the creation, use, archiving, and deletion of information in an efficient and compliant way.

Since 2020, we can see two trends in information governance, fueled by the pandemic.
The first one is the rise of the use of electronic signatures, and the other is the will to achieve cleaner digitization processes.

The electronic signature seems ubiquitous nowadays; however, many companies still haven’t adopted it by default. The PDF specification includes various digital signatures and electronic seals to fit all contexts and easily be included in collaborative workflows.

The PDF specification offers different ways of signing documents compatible with various regulations like the European eIDAS. PDF developers can integrate the features adapted to each industry and context from a simple drawing of a signature (simple signature) to the use of certificates and timestamps (qualified and certified signatures).

With people working remotely, scanned and shared documents are higher than ever. Organizations and companies need to manage much more electronic records, in all formats and with a lot of duplicated information.

Cleaner digitization processes can take several forms, for example, format uniformization of all the electronic documents and reduction of the size of the archives.

All document and image formats are easily converted to PDF: images, emails, HTML files, vector files, and office formats. Once converted to PDF, especially PDF/OCR for scanned documents, these files can benefit from all the PDF features.

The PDF and PDF/A standards allow many compression techniques adapted to different contexts. Something to consider to reduce the size of archives significantly.

Of course, the new trends shouldn’t overshadow laws and regulations worldwide, pushing companies’ agendas regarding data governance.
We’re taking two examples here: electronic invoicing and privacy laws.

Several countries are slowly making the use of electronic invoicing mandatory.
In France, for instance, we’ve already started the process, and progressively all companies will need to receive and generate electronic invoices by 2026.

ZUGgFERD and Factur-X are two standards for electronic invoicing that use PDF and PDF/A.

Since the beginning of 2022, every day comes with its GDPR alert. As a result, privacy policies are getting tighter by the hour, and there is a crucial need to manage employees and customer data in a compliant way.
Once again, the PDF specification can help with tools such as redaction to remove personal and sensitive data and encryption to control access to documents.

Finally, a reliable and compliant archiving plan is one of the most critical challenges of information governance, and PDF/A is the ideal format for the long-term archiving of electronic documents.

The PDF/A specification is quite complex and includes many conformance levels. Just like PDF, PDF/A evolves with each new version and there are a lot of differences between PDF/A-1 and the latest PDF/A-4.
To be sure that all your PDF/A documents and ISO compliant, it is important to run them through a validator to avoid potential reading issues in the future.

The next challenges of information governance are universal accessibility and data processing. Both can be made easier with tagged PDFs.

Accessible documents should be a requirement for all companies. It is a social necessity for people with disabilities and a legal necessity in many countries.
However, it is not because a PDF is tagged that the job is done. Not all tagged PDFs can be considered accessible.
The PDF/UA standard (ISO 14289) describes the technical specifications to generate and validate fully accessible and ISO compliant PDF files.

The last challenge of information governance, and the most complex, is to extract relevant data from the mass of files, especially from unstructured documents like scanned (image) PDFs.

There are many benefits of tagged PDFs for intelligent document and data processing:

• It’s easier to extract text and graphics from a tagged document.
• It helps tools to process text for searching, indexing, and spell-checking purposes.
• It preserves the document structure for conversion to file formats such as HTML, XML, and text documents.
• Tagged PDF provides a solution for semantic reuse of PDF content.

At ORPALIS, we provide collaborative and compliant solutions to manage the entire document lifecycle, from acquisition to archiving. Our developer tools, GdPicture.NET, DocuVieware, and PassportPDF REST APIs help companies and organizations from all industries, worldwide, to tackle all these challenges.

Our UK-based team Aquaforest is specialized in automated PDF document software for data extraction and conversion for SharePoint and other Microsoft platforms (SharePoint Online and On-Premises, Microsoft Power Automate, Azure, and Windows Servers).

Aquaforest offers a fully-automated enterprise software suite for processing high volumes of PDF files, which provides:

• data extraction,
• searchable PDF conversion,
• OCR,
• and metadata tagging features.

Learn more about all our solutions on our Products page.

PDF is more relevant than ever for information governance.
What can it bring to your organization?

As members of the PDF Association, we’re happy to help you with your PDF challenges, so let’s connect!

Elodie