Pat Myers - Intelligent Document Capture with Ephesoft

In my recent e-book #OccupyIT: A Technology Manifesto for the Cloud, Mobile, and Social Era (http://www.aiim.org/occupyIT), I talk about the revolutionary changes that are impacting how we make enterprise technology decisions.

On the one hand, we have "the business," awed and impressed by the changes and speed of implementation in the consumer technology space (think Facebook, Google, Twitter), asking their IT departments why enterprise technology has to be so "old fashioned," why implementation needs to take so long, and why enterprise technology has to be so darn expensive.

On the other hand, we have "IT", struggling to maintain order amidst the chaos, and struggling with expectations from "the business" that are escalating exponentially. IT spending by IT is flat, while IT spending by "the business" is increasing significantly. Clearly the traditional world of enterprise IT is changing.

In many ways, the cloud and open source revolutions are two sides of the same coin. They stem from the desire to buy technology "by the glass," to buy technology in which the release cycles are frequent and manageable rather than long and frightening, and you can "try before you buy" (and especially before you scale!).

According to a recent global CIO survey, 60 percent of organizations are ready to embrace cloud computing over the next five years as a means of growing their businesses and achieving a competitive advantage. The figure is nearly twice the number of CIOs who said they would utilize the cloud in the previous study.

The impact of the cloud and open source, though, will be massive beyond the immediate revenues that will be classified in industry studies as cloud and open source because they fundamentally change the way we look at IT services, how we pay for these services within our organization (capital spending versus operating), and how we view upgrade paths (and who is responsible for these upgrades). Organizations that do not incorporate rapid and flexible implementation and adoption models into their thinking do so at their own peril.

This frame of flexibility and rapid deployment is how we need to think about an aspect of the content management industry that has been with us for a long time; capture.

No matter how elegant the frontend, Systems of Engagement (for a white paper on this, see http://aiim.org/futurehistory) cannot operate in an environment in which the processes that support and complement these Systems of Engagement are engulfed by paper and inefficiency. The reality is that most organizations exist in a hybrid environment in which process information may come from paper documents, paper forms, web forms, faxes, telephony, e-mails, SMS, mobile, and social.

Automated capture of information as early as possible in the business process and as close to the point of origination produces cleaner data, resulting in higher quality information, less exception handling, and better process management. The more important the process is to a business, the greater the impact such improvements will have. Once paper-based information moves into the digital realm it can be used to enrich social and mobile applications. In paper form, that information might as well not exist since no one can get to it without great effort.

The reality that exists in most organizations suggests that although capture and its associated technologies are mature technologies, the market and the scale of implementation is anything but.

According to a recent AIIM study (Automating Financial Processes: User Feedback on the Real ROI), the average cost to process a paper invoice is still more than $9. Overall, 52 percent of organizations surveyed have yet to adopt any automated AP systems. One third of organizations receiving more than 25,000 invoices per month are still using paper-based processes.

These findings were reaffirmed in a follow-up AIIM survey (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet). A third of small and mid-sized companies and 22 percent of the largest have yet to adopt any paper-free processes. Only 20 percent of organizations of any size proactively evaluate all processes for driving out paper. The percentage of processes that could be paper free is actually only 14 percent. Seventy-seven percent of invoices that arrive as PDF attachments get printed. Thirty-one percent of faxed invoices get printed and scanned back in.

I could go on and on. Perhaps the most astonishing thing about all of this is how compelling the ROI actually is for scanning and capture once people can be convinced to make the jump.

Per Process Revolution, on average respondents using scanning and capture consider that it improves the speed of response to customers, suppliers, citizens, or staff by six times or more. Seventy percent estimate an improvement of at least three times, and nearly a third (29 percent) sees an improvement of 10 times or more. Forty-two percent of users have achieved a payback period of 12 months or less from their scanning and capture investments. Fifty-seven percent are posting a payback of 18 months or less.

So the opportunity is there. I am convinced we can all do a better job of educating decision-makers about new cloud and open source models for delivering capture and content management technologies. I am also convinced that we can all do a better job of educating decision-makers about the benefits of capture and how to implement capture systems quickly and effectively. Hence, my great pleasure in writing the foreword to this book.

John Mancini ,

Author, Speaker, and President of AIIM