The technology world, especially software, has been moving to ‘platforms’ at a rapid pace in recent years. A platform provides the use a single place to do everything you need. For example, Amazon for buying/selling is a marketplace platform. Or Google, with search, mail, photos, YouTube, payments is another example of a platform.
Similar patterns can be seen in non-tech products as well – Gillette vs Schik as shaving ‘platforms’.
While there are advantages, platforms have received a lot of negative press and pushback lately – and rightly use. Platforms lock end users into a single vendor solution making it hard (almost impossible) to switch. The objectives of the solution provider and the solution user are not aligned — platforms are good for the vendor but not so for the end user. Another, bigger, issue is that platforms evolve towards a monopoly model, squeezing out innovation and competition. Our view is that end users (higher education institutions) have delayed their digitization efforts as they have resisted getting locked up with ‘platform” solutions. It is time to un-bundle digital documents platforms.
What is ‘unbundling’ in the context of digital documents? At its most basic level, the tech solution that was used to ‘issue’ the digital document need not be the same as the tech solution used to ‘retrieve’ the document.
This separation of issuer and receiver solutions enables issuers of digital documents to choose a partner that is best suited for their requirement and comfort level. Most importantly, if in a few years they want to change their partner, they can do so since the same partner is not controlling how earlier issued documents will be retrieved. Document retrieval is separated from document issue – which achieves the un-bundling and gives more flexibility.
To learn more about how educerts offers unbundling, please contact us at sales@educerts.net