Document Imaging Blog

The Office Document Ecosystem

Ed Schmid, our CEO, was invited to keynote Infotrend's European Office Document Technology conference earlier this week in Amsterdam. The conference is an industry event, attended by hardware and software manufacturers, but as is often the case, the main topic of conversation was what is happening in the document imaging market from the customer's perspective.

Ed's presentation focused in on the emerging ecosystem in the office document technology market. For a recap of his keynote presentation, click here. In brief, Ed describes the ecosystem:

"The ecosystem is a deeper level of partnership among software vendors, MFP manufacturers, and office equipment dealers who are teaming to enable greater end user success. The motivation is two-fold. One, create differentiation to drive more business. But as important, it is recognition that to be successful, everyone needs to be working more closely to together to address a customer's unique needs."

The power of this ecosystem is the ability to deliver a standard solution that supports the collaboration needs of end users. Ed explains further:

"We see companies -- driven by their IT departments -- working to build solutions around a standard. Take a look at document scanning. For end user organizations, a standard means office workers can use the same scanning procedures at any of an organization's MFPs, which can be especially important for compliance purposes."

Included in this ecosystem are the software vendors who end users have selected to handle content management, document management and collaboration. With the full ecosystem driving towards a standard document imaging solution, the end goal of bringing the user's desktop experience to the MFP -- which helps leverage even more of a company's infrastructure investments -- is well within reach.

Document imaging and business processes

In the course of my job, I have the opportunity to speak with a lot of our customers to learn about their pains and challenges and the steps they have taken to solve them. The common thread -- regardless of customer size or vertical -- is that they are looking to automate more of their everyday business processes. For many, automation means implementing technology to replace manual processes.

Three of the more common processes that end users are trying to automate are those that require forms, such as expense reports, vacation requests and purchase orders. As paper-based processes, they create pains such as delays in approvals, progress tracking and handling volumes of paper forms, receipts and supporting documentation.

Some situations are worse then others. For New Jersey Transit, a typical purchase order requisition took 42 days to process, starting with a paper form and crawling through the interoffice mail system as it was reviewed and approved. By removing the paper from the processes and leveraging Microsoft Exchange, a new system was developed and the process was cut from 42 days to an average of 2! Read more here.

What successes have you had by using document imaging to improve business processes? We'd like to hear from you.

Document Imaging from an IT perspective

As document imaging moves from the back office to the front office through the use of devices such as networked MFPs and scanners, the internal control of these technologies is migrating more towards IT. We recently had a chance to sit down with Tim Captain of industry analyst firm BLI to talk about document imaging and he had this to say about what IT professionals should consider when evaluating document imaging software:

"In addition to third-party software integration, document encryption is also essential. You can put paper files under lock and key, and you have to be able to do the same with your electronic documents. Support for smart cards and identity assurance services are also important, as is single sign-on at the MFP, so users don't have to enter separate usernames and passwords to scan at the MFP and login to back-end applications where they'd like to send those scanned documents."

These concerns are clearly in the IT domain and ones that not too long ago would not have been considerations when talking about MFPs. It is clearly a changing world. Amongst the IT concerns that need to be addressed, Tim also commented that it is critical for IT to consider its constituents when evaluating document imaging software:

"Many IT administrators become so focused on additional features, however, that they lose sight of the most important one: ease of use. If a solution is difficult for end users to operate, they won't use it, making the product worthless, regardless of how many advanced features it offers. In order to be effective, solutions need a clean, intuitive interface that allows users of any level of technological savvy to use it with only minimal instruction."

You can read the full Q&A with Tim here.

Is ECM really the problem?

As hard as we may try to avoid this, when you work in an industry - and especially if you are in marketing - it is easy to start thinking that everybody in your universe talks in the same langauge that you do. As industries evolve, vendors, the media and analysts, industry organizations and other influencers develop terms and dreaded acronyms to talk about products and problems, and they quickly get adopted by each other. Eventually you find yourself talking to your customers about your "SaaS CRM solution for SMBs with a sales force automation problem". When what they really want to hear is that your product can help their sales people track leads better without having to invest heavily in supporting more IT systems.

In our industry, the hot term is ECM, or Enterprise Content Management. I hear it and use it all the time. So much, in fact, that I stopped questioning whether the universe knew what ECM was. Then, this week, AIIM President John Mancini wrote this blog post about a survey AIIM conducted with executive, line of business and IT individuals who are not affiliated with AIIM (which by the way, is an industry association focused on ECM). The survey results showed that only 24% of the respondents had even heard the term ECM. On the plus side, of the 160 people who had heard the terms, nearly 3/4 of them understood what it was.

The AIIM definition of ECM is "the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes." That's accurate and all encompassing, but it is certainly a handful. And, based on the survey, it is not what companies are thinking about.

So here's my pledge to you. In this blog, we will strive to talk about the actual problems that customers are facing and the ways that they are solving those problems. We'll talk about the problems that result from paper-based processes and how to solve them. We'll talk about sharing information between workers. We'll talk about making workers more productive. We'll even get into some deeper technology discussions about scanning, MFPs, PDFs and other image types. And hopefully you'll begin to understand how these problems and solutions fit into a bigger strategy...maybe even start thinking about ECM. But that's not where we are going to start.

Paperless Offices - The Real Story

There has been a resurgence of buzz around the paperless office lately, mostly focused around the question myth vs. reality. It’s refreshing to read the articles that are written about the topic, such as this story from Practical Accountant. Each of them profiles customers that have taken steps to convert paper to electronic images in order to remove paper from slowing critical business operations. And each of the customers is equally enthusiastic about the results that they have achieved, both through cost savings and a more effective workforce.

So does this recent buzz mean that the paperless office is becoming a reality? Not really. Companies today receive too many paper documents from internal processes and external parties to ever reach paperless nirvana. But there is a big opportunity to focus on going “paperless” as a way to improve the process – rather than an end-game. Business processes like accounting and procurement have greatly benefited by moving online. It is only natural companies should work to pull the paper-based information associated with these applications into electronic workflows.

In our conversations with our customers, we’ve found that the one of the biggest challenges to eliminating paper from business processes is the behavioral switch. Workers are comfortable with paper and don’t necessarily like to lose “control” of their paper documents in order to send them somewhere to be scanned. A good place to start is to empower all office workers to capture paper-based information at the point in the business that is most convenient and efficient. One way to do this is to use a publicly available, familiar device, such as the office MFP, for scanning. By using document imaging software for MFPs, the people closest to work processes can add paper-based information to workflows, making the transition less of a disruption to the worker.

So while the paperless office itself is still a myth, removing paper from processes to create a seamless digital workflow is definitely a reality. For an example of one company that did it, click here. Do you have a "paperless" story to share? Send us a comment, we'd love to hear from you.

Introducing the Document Imaging Blog

Welcome to the Document Imaging Blog. We started this blog because we discovered the Web didn’t have a good, comprehensive place to keep up with the document imaging space…at least not from the end user perspective.  Sure, there are lots of sites that have lots of information about topics that relate to and touch document imaging (take a look at our blog roll), but they tend to be focused on subjects like content management, information governance and PDF technology. These are all great topics -- and we will be talking about them in the blog from time to time – but document imaging is just a part of their blogs. In this blog, document imaging is the conversation.

Why do we need a place to discuss document imaging? Well, quite simply, it’s used everywhere but often misunderstood. To help people understand what it is and why they should be thinking about it, I like to address two questions:

Q) What is document imaging?  A) The process of converting paper documents to digital images.

Q) Why is this important? A) It allows you to include paper-based information in your electronic workflows.

This is document imaging at its heart. Like any technology, it has growing levels of complexity in different use cases and we will attempt to cover all aspects of the space. The goal of this blog is to be a place to come and learn about document imaging and how organizations can use the technology to function more effectively and efficiently by including paper-based information in their electronic workflows. We hope that you find it helpful and encourage you to join the conversation with your thoughts, opinions and questions.