Digital Landfill

Eliminating Paper from Processes Improves Customer Response Times by 300%

Today we released a new industry watch research paper, titled “The Paper Free Office - Dream or Reality.” The research finds that removing paper from business continues to be challenging, despite data that shows significant responsiveness and productivity gains in customer service when paper-based bottlenecks are eliminated from business processes.

Speed of response times are also realized by employees working remotely in the field or home offices when the ability to share and search is improved by using digitized content. According to Doug Miles, director of market intelligence at AIIM, “The earlier in the process that capture takes place, the better the transparency and availability the content will have. The data is available to the process faster, and paper forms handling is eliminated.”

Key findings of the research conducted between November 2011 and January 2012 show:

• Paper is beginning to disappear, with 35 percent of respondents confirmed less paper consumption and photocopying.
• 42 percent of scanning and capture projects achieved a payback period of 12 months or less, while 57 percent of projects achieved payback in 18 months or less.
• Mobile and cloud services for scanning and capture are finding early adopters in the enterprise.
• 38 percent of respondents are equipping employees with portable capture devices when not in the office, including portable scanners, smart phones and tablets.
• 20 percent of the largest organizations are committed to a cloud deployment strategy for capture.
• Scanning and capture can seriously improve customer response times - typically between 2 and 3 times faster, but in many cases 5 and 10 times faster.

Despite significant benefits realized by paper-free organizations, some poor habits persist:

• 77 percent of invoices that arrive as PDF attachments are printed, while 31percent of fax invoices are printed and then re-scanned.
• 45 percent of documents that are scanned were completely “born digital”.
• 32 percent of organizations reported an increase in the level of paper consumption and copying.

The full report, “The Paper Free Office - Dream or Reality” can be downloaded from the AIIM web site at http://www.aiim.org/Research/Industry-Watch/Paper-Free-Capture-2012.  If you need more detail, please contact Doug or me or our press contact, Laurinda Hoffman and McKenzie Worldwide (laurindah@mckenzieworldwide.com or 503-475-8815).

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This research has been underwritten by: ABBYY, EMC, IBM, Kofax, and Swiss Post. Here is a bit of background on AIIM and on the sponsors of the report...

About AIIM 
AIIM has been an advocate and supporter of information professionals for nearly 70 years. The association’s mission is to ensure that information professionals understand the current and future challenges of managing information assets in an era of social, mobile, cloud and big data. Founded in 1943, AIIM builds on a strong heritage of research and member service. Today, AIIM is a global, non-profit organization that provides independent research, education and certification programs to information professionals. AIIM represents the entire information management community, with programs and content for practitioners, technology suppliers, integrators and consultants.

About ABBYY 
ABBYY ® is a leading provider of document recognition, document capture, and linguistic technologies. The key areas of ABBYY's research and development include document recognition technologies and applied linguistics. Paper-intensive organizations from all over the world use ABBYY solutions to automate time- and labor-consuming tasks and to streamline business processes. www.abbyy.com. 

About EMC 
EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect, and analyze their most valuable asset—information—in a more agile, trusted, and cost-efficient way. www.EMC.com.

About IBM Enterprise Content Management 
IBM Enterprise Content Management solutions enable the world’s top companies to make better decisions, faster. As a market leader in content, process and compliance software, IBM ECM delivers a broad set of mission-critical solutions that help solve today’s most difficult business challenges: managing unstructured content, optimizing business processes and helping satisfy complex compliance requirements through an integrated information infrastructure. www.ibm.com/software/data/ecm.

About Kofax 
Kofax plc is the leading provider of capture driven process automation solutions. Kofax solutions provide a rapid return on investment by automating information intensive processes and by managing the capture of information in a more accurate, timely and cost-effective manner. Visit www.kofax.com.

About Swiss Post
Swiss Post Solutions (SPS), a division of Swiss Post, offers a comprehensive range of document and business process outsourcing services. With 7000 people working across Europe, North America and Asia and with access to an extensive partner network, SPS is able to provide its clients with on, near or off-shore document capture and processing options for automating business processes. Visit www.swisspostsolutions.com.

 

 

A short primer on email management - some core concepts

Here's a short primer on Email Management from our Information Certification educational videos (they're free! -- and feel free to embed them on your own web site!)

Key Concepts and Issues -- Part 1

Key Concepts and Issues -- Part 2

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From a conversation with Ken Bisconti from IBM on the Future of Social Content.  Ken on the AIIM CIP -- "Anyone in IT or in an information related discipline today should be thinking about it." 

Looking to demonstrate that you have the ability to solve an organization's information-related problems and plan for the future? Check out the new Certified Information Professional (CIP) certification. This is not a training program, but a certification exam available from Prometric tests centers across the world. Learn more >

 

Geoff Moore (@geoffreyamoore) and the #ECM coolness factor

I recently blogged on the theme The Cool is Back in ECM, reflecting on my attendance at two widely varying industry events, the Box.Net BoxWorks conference, and IBM's Information on Demand.  My conclusion, based on my data point of whether my kids had heard of the entertainment (ECM passed the test this year!) is that the Cool is Back in ECM.

I did find myself after writing that post wondering, "How could both statements -- 'BoxWorks was Cool, IBM IOD was Cool' -- be true within the same content management space?" 

I came across this diagram by Geoff Moore in his new book Escape Velocity that started me thinking, as Geoff's stuff often does.  Good book; get it. (Some of you may remember that Geoff did some work for AIIM last year on Systems of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT.)

Here's the diagram...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So per this diagram, there are two flavors of content solutions, one focused on a sweet spot that is rich in complexity and depth and focused on a finite customer set with enough scale to take advantage of information complexity and deep analytics (e.g., IBM, Oracle, Open Text, EMC).  The second is a set of solutions that have been built from the assumption of simplicity and scale and focus on a very broad customer set (e.g., Box, DropBox, SkyDox, Yammer, Google Docs).

And yet even within the dichotomy of this model, there seems to be some nuances and complexities to think about relative to our industry.  

• The kind of scale represented by volume operations and often introduced via a freemium to premium deployment model offers all sorts of value to small and mid-sized organizations that used to be shut out of the content management solutions space.  SharePoint started here, working its way into the enterprise initially as a freebie through IT types.  Google Docs did as well, starting with individual consumers. Companies like Box and Yammer started here as well, often with customers in organizations frustrated by the limits of their own IT departments.
• But at the same time, the longer term dynamic has gotten progressively more complex. The volume game initially plays out through the prism of the number of customers, and that lends itself well to the freemium-premium model.  But the game in our industry ultimately plays out through the number of seats that someone is willing to actually pay for, and the place for that volume to ultimately be found is among the companies who are often customers on the complex systems side of the house.  Thus it creates a need for the volume players to connect themselves to the complex systems game.
• And if that wasn't complicated enough, the expectations for simplicity and ease of use and ease of implemention in the volume game ultimately carry over into the complex systems game. Driving prices down for users and creating a demand for simplicity.

Gets me a bit dizzy.  I guess I should take some comfort in the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." [Note: My wife would likely question both the intelligence part and the ability to function part.]

 

 

Get that Christmas shopping done early; yes Virginia, I do have a life outside AIIM

Looking for that perfect holiday gift?  Look no further than Will's Christmas List.

Imagine if you will, the following reviews.  If they had actually occurred, would you be likely to actually buy this book?

"I laughed until I stopped." (New York Times Book Review)

"This book could help bridge the gap between liberals and conservatives." (Barack Obama)

"The pages as well as the chapters are numbered sequentially. Amazing." (Kirkus Book Reviews)

"If there was a movie made of this book, the father would be played by Colin Firth and the mother would be played by Amy Adams." (Mary G. Mancini and John F. Mancini, in order to satisfy our respective fantasies)

This is a labor of love that I wrote over a number of years for my kids.  It has literally sold tens of copies over the years, assuring that the massive royalties I receive (in some years, well into double digits) will not be a threat to AIIM's continued claim upon my services.

I do like to do a bit of experimenting each year with the Long Tail Phenomenon and watch how modest numbers of units affect my ranking within the long tail on the best seller list.  

So here's the starting point.  Right now, per Amazon, Will's Christmas List is #4,210,041 in Books. Let's see where it winds up; I'll report back.

Have fun.

 

Some #social, #local, #mobile presentations you may have missed...

OK, here they are.  Check 'em out.

For those whose email servers screen out embedded content, the presentations are first listed as links...(I'll be posting more from my colleagues next week)...As usual, feel free to borrow with attribution...

• Content Opportunities in Revolutionary Times
• What is an information professional?
• How Can Social Technologies Be Used to Drive Processes and Innovation?
• World Paper Free Day
• If SharePoint is Your Answer, Do You Khow What Your Question Is?

Content Opportunities in Revolutionary Times

View more presentations from John Mancini

What is an information professional?

View more presentations from John Mancini

How can social technologies be used to drive processes and innovation?

View more presentations from John Mancini

World Paper Free Day -- Oct 27

View more presentations from John Mancini

If SharePoint is your answer, do you know what your question is?

View more presentations from John Mancini

The Cool is Back in ECM

What has happened to the old stodgy content management space?

One way that I think you can measure the coolness of an industry is to look at who is doing the entertainment at industry functions (I know, frivolous, but stick with me).

Let's be honest for a minute about the kinds of bands one would see at ECM user conferences in recent years. Gladys Knight and the Pip (yes, there is sadly only one Pip left). Earth, Wind, and Fire. Fortunately for everyone concerned, at least no one booked Bachman Turner Overdrive despite the potential attractiveness of a "Taking Care of Business with ECM" theme.

Well, judging by 2 recent user conferences I attended last month, the times they are a changin' (OK, I realize this is a dated reference).

I was lucky enough to go to Box's Boxworks conference and IBM's Information on Demand event. The bands? Third Eye Blind and train. Bands my kids like. Bands my kids have heard in concert. Clearly an inflection point. This ain't your Father's content management; content is cool again.

I can't think of two more different companies on the content spectrum than Box and IBM, and yet the coolness factor not only applied to the bands, but to the value proposition being articulated.

Box's focus on content management in the cloud is clearly striking a chord with those looking for file share replacements and document centric collaboration and simplicity of implementation. The 18,000 seat P&G implementation they announced represents something of a tipping point for me in terms of the viability and relevance of cloud-based content management.  So too did the investment by Salesforce.com in the company.  At the other end of the spectrum, IBM's extension of the Watson technology set into real applications and the broader case studies focused on the power of analytics and big data were, frankly, way cool. 

All of this is not to say that Box and IBM are better or worse than any other solutions, because that's not my job.

But I am excited about what these events say about the coolness factor of content technologies as an industry and what these two user conferences indicate about the future -- in wildly varying content spaces. I'm doubly excited that a centerpiece of BOTH of these events was the work that AIIM did with Geoffrey Moore on Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement (http://www.aiim.org/futurehistory).

Social. Mobile. Cloud. Big Data. They are all reenergizing and redefining content management.  Here are some of the themes we're teeing up for next year...

• Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PCs to Tablets
• Big Data: Extracting Value from Digital Landfills
• Solving the SharePoint Puzzle: Adding the Right Missing Pieces
• Faster, Simpler, Smarter: Collaborating and Processing in the Cloud
• Social in the Flow: Transforming Processes

So get rid of those bell bottomed jeans. Download some of your kid's tracks from iTunes (they probably charged them to your account anyway) and get ready for the future of content management.

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Speaking of cool, I'm keynoting OpenText's Content World November 16 (My peeps save $300 w/ code CW2011KEY - http://bit.ly/unc4le) and also running an Executive Social Business Seminar with Oracle in NY on November 10.

Have you signed up for the new AIIM Conference March 2012 in San Francisco? For solution providers, almost all the premium slots are sold - get moving! For attendees, mark your calendars!

 

 

Calling all VARs, SIs and Service Companies -- #AIIM Executive Forum just around the corner

One of my favorite AIIM events each year is the annual Executive Forum.  For those unfamiliar with the event, it's the premier event for executives from companies in the document and content management channel. It's being held November 3-5 in Hollywood, FL.

Two action items.

First, if you are in the channel and not planning to attend, think again.  It's a terrific event. Registration is here -- http://www.aiim.org/Events/DMSPF/. Past the word.

Second, I'm starting to work on my keynote.  If you are in the channel, would be interested in your perspectives.

• What are the big issues facing your company?
• How are you dealing with them?
• Where do you see the biggest opportunities in the next year?

Either post a comment or send me an email.

Here are some of the things people said at the event last year -- 

"In one or two sessions of this year's DMSPEF in Nashville, I paid for the trip with the ideas and takeaways. See you next year!"

Mark Zecy
CEO
American Micro Company

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"If one of the products does as I expect it will, the trip will be paid for in a few days worth of scanning. I also have some attendees coming to my shop to discuss products and software that may be able to cut out thousands of dollars of labor from our processes. All good stuff!"

Jack Bobeck
CIO Business Services and Owner
Imaging Source

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"Thank you for another terrific event. You all did a great job in planning and delivering a highly successful event. We had a tremendous show with great potential for new business and new relationships. 

Our Hitachi representatives from Japan could not have been more pleased as well. So, thank you for the excellent work you all did in making this event a success for us."

Gary J. Armstrong
President
Imaging 411 Inc.

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5 myths about document capture

[As is the case with our 8 things series, the opinions expressed in the 5 myths guest columns are those of the guest contributor and not necessarily mine or AIIM's.  This guest post is by Bill Galusha from EMC. As usual, contra perspectives welcome.]

Myth #1: Desktop scanning works well enough for digitizing my paper documents

Reality: Digitizing your paper is really just a small piece to the solution and does provide some value, but the scope of your business problem will determine whether or not a simple desktop capture solution is going to do the job.  For small organizations or businesses that are looking to do a simple back-file document conversion project, a basic capture system might satisfy their requirements.  But for mid- and large-sized organizations, the requirements are often more complex and require advanced document automation, distributed capture, and connectivity with a host of business systems.

In this case, organizations need to consider an intelligent enterprise capture solution that delivers a full range of capabilities including the ability to capture documents from anywhere within the organization, automatically connect information to your business systems, and deliver both scalability and high availability for those mission critical processes.

It is time to think big and bold, and get beyond simple scan and archive. Doing so has the potential of bringing significant benefits in the form of operational cost savings, streamlined business processes, and improved productivity.

Myth #2: Intelligent document recognition sounds great, but it is too expensive to implement

Reality: Simply making a decision based purely on price is not always the best choice. In the case of intelligent document recognition, customers receive a significant return on investment, often driving value that is several multiples larger than the purchase price. As Brian Babineau stated in an Enterprise Strategy white paper, The Strategic Value of Information Capture, “The question is not whether an information capture solution will provide an ROI; it’s how big it will be.” 

Depending on the business requirements – volume of paper, variety of documents and amount of data being captured, operating budget constraints, how time sensitive documents are, and importance of information – you can quickly understand if advanced capture capabilities like intelligent document classification and data extraction is something you really need.

When you have established that there is a business case for intelligent document recognition, the ROI can be significant. Take for example, an investment and asset management company, who is intelligently classifying and capturing data from 5,000 mail items (40,000 pages daily) which includes deposit documents, applications, and other financial related documents. By taking advantage of the advanced capture capabilities available to them, they require 30% less staff in their document services group, and are saving 1.1 million annually from decreased maintenance, capital, and labor costs.

Myth #3: We invested in capture years ago; we’re doing as much as we should be doing with scanning.

Reality:  Remember, when you bought that old station wagon back in the 1970’s, you thought it was the best family investment you could have made at the time. If we fast forward to today, we now have the minivan and other cars geared towards families. These cars are more economical in terms of fuel efficiency, longer lasting, safer, better for the environment, more options, and so on.

Like cars, software technology does not stand still rather software is constantly advancing and getting better. A case in point are advanced document and data captures solutions that can automatically identify hundreds if not thousands of different document types and extracting data at a very high confidence resulting in lower costs and more efficient processes. Today, many businesses are choosing to reinvest in better and more advanced capture technology and replace systems that have outlived their benefits. Why replace what has worked for years? Simply put it makes your processes become more efficient, less costly, and directly impacts the services you are able to deliver.  

Take a look at Canada’s largest credit union and you will find that by replacing an aging capture system, the credit union has cut document preparation and data entry by 50%. Just imagine being able to reduce data entry by half - you would be able to do more with less, or reduce your operational budget. It is no wonder why analysts like Gartner, IDC, Forester, and others see document imaging as one the safest IT investments a company can make.

Myth #4: Paper is a problem of the past; our company is committed to electronic communication and forms

Reality: This is definitely one of the best myths that I’ve heard over the years. But the fact remains, paper is still used to support critical business operations. According to a recent AIIM Industry Watch Report, the consumption of paper and number of photocopies is still growing in 27% of organizations, and 39% of organizations are seeing a decrease somewhat.  If you posed the same question to employees in an industry like government, chances are the use of paper is much higher.

There are several reasons why paper is likely to continue to remain important in businesses including the fact that much of the paper businesses receive comes from outside of the business, which means that you have little control over it. Other reasons include industries like government must support paper as an accessible way of doing business, paper often supports an electronic process, and some document driven processes remain very complex making it difficult to flip a switch and go all electronic.

While the use of paper will most certainly continue to decline over the next decade, our best recommendation to businesses is don’t try and boil the ocean when it comes to changing up your business processes. Look for ways to convert paper into digital information, and connect the content with existing and new electronic processes. 

Myth #5: I’m just not scanning enough paper to be interested in enterprise capture.

Reality: This goes back the first myth in which some companies think scanning paper is “good enough” and that enterprise capture is more than they need.  Maybe this is true if you are a small business where you have only a few hundred documents a day, but for any mid to large size company, basic scanning is not good enough.

In fact, enterprise capture means more than just high volume document capture. It is about supporting distributed capture, intelligently identify documents and extracting data, and connecting information to many different systems. Whereas in the past, capture was primarily used for digitizing and archiving content; today, capture plays an important role in streamlining critical business processes likes claims, new account opening, deposits, taxes, criminal case records, and many others. In these cases, processing information fast and with the least amount of resources is what most companies set their sights on.

Go cheap and settle for a much smaller ROI, and you will likely be disappointed. 

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About the Author:  Bill Galusha joined EMC in January 2007, and is a Principal Product Marketing Manager for the Captiva intelligent enterprise capture solution. Mr. Galusha has 20 years of experience in marketing and managing various software products including document capture, eForms, and business process management. Prior to joining EMC, Mr. Galusha held a variety of senior product marketing and product management positions at Cardiff Software, Mitek Systems, and Alignent Software. 

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Have you signed up for the new AIIM Conference March 2012 in San Francisco? For solution providers, almost all the premium slots are sold - get moving! For attendees, mark your calendars!

 

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Other "5 myths" posts...

5 myths about content ROT

5 myths about collaboration

5 myths about the paperless office that hinder Document Management adoption

5 myths about working with information in the 21st century

5 myths about records management

5 myths about enterprise social media

5 myths about SharePoint records management

5 myths about electronic document management for small business

5 myths about collaboration in the enterprise

5 myths about document automation and electronic document creation

5 myths about ECM ROI

5 myths about document management

5 myths about the CMIS standard

5 myths about SharePoint

5 myths about taxonomy and SharePoint

 

 

Q3 results are in - Top AIIM expert blog posts and Digital Landfill posts

It's time for the glamour competition among the AIIM expert bloggers and Digital Landill bloggers.

The top 10 posts in the third quarter!

A comment before I trigger a slew of Twitter comments both pro and con about SharePoint.

1. We (AIIM) don't select the topics.
2. We (AIIM staff) don't click like maniacs on SharePoint topics while at home at night to try and drive up the traffic.
3. Yes, I know that the time boundaries do create a bit of a bias for those posts at the beginning of the quarter vs. the end of the quarter.

With those caveats, here are the results...

Here are the top 10 posts for the AIIM Expert bloggers:

1. 5 myths about SharePoint records management
2. Is SharePoint 2010 really ready for ECM?
3. Creating an ECM organizational structure - building your team
4. The truth about folders
5. It's the users - an old story repeated many times
6. Developing a hybrid SharePoint 2010/ERM/ECM platform (SPaaS)
7. User profile list in SharePoint 2010
8. A tweet is a record
9.  SharePoint - Where to begin - Play Legos
10. eDiscovery and records management - a perfect storm?

And on the Digital Landfill site...

1. What the hell is Google+? - Here's an answer
2. 8 reasons SharePoint 2010 looks like a true ECM system
3. 5 myths about taxonomy and SharePoint
4. 5 myths about records management
5. 5 myths about the paperless office that hinder document management software adoption
6. 5 myths about SharePoint
7. 37 really cool statistics about social media
8. 5 myths about the CMIS standard
9. 6 presentations you should look at if you don't believe that mobile changes everything
10. 8 steps of the ISO/TR 15489 records management methodology

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Have you signed up for the new AIIM Conference March 2012 in San Francisco? For solution providers, almost all the premium slots are sold - get moving! For attendees, mark your calendars!

SharePoint Saturday "The Conference" quick recap - #spstcdc

Part conference. Part networking opportunity. Part selling space. Part tribal gathering. Part evangelical tent meeting. With a liberal dose of serendipity. And a talent show.

That was SharePoint Saturday The Conference on Thursday through Saturday at the Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, VA. Who knows exactly how many people there were, but I am told the pre-reg was about 1800.  At a sub-$100 price point for a 3 day event with 250+ presentations, the price was certainly right. For those used to more "formal" events, the ever changing room assignments and last-minute changes could be a bit overwhelming. But this chaos was balanced by an awesome volunteer commitment.

Founder and Chief Organizer Michael Lottner is to be applauded for this gathering of the tribe. It is really fun to see so many focused -- and young! -- people gathered in one place and talking about, of all things, content management!

Thanks to Dux Raymond Sy (@meetdux) for inviting me to speak; it was a lot of fun and inspiring. Here's a link to my presentation, and for those who can view active content, have also embedded my presentation.  The presentation focuses on the need to be clear on exactly what you are trying to do with SharePoint and why, and the changing nature of enterprise IT.

If SharePoint is your answer, do you know what your question is?

View more presentations from John Mancini