Capture Moves to the Head of the Class

Document conversion has a stinky reputation of being: (1.) Expensive; (2.) disruptive; and (3.) difficult to cost-justify. One of the reasons is that, historically, imaging is thought of in a very binary way. You either image, or you don’t. No gray area.

But that mood is changing. What used to be the final act in a business process—scan the paper and shred it—is increasingly at the "front-end" of the process, and is tied to the ensuing business process...whatever it might be.

I talked this month with two very thoughtful representatives of the imaging trade, who come at the problem from very different perspectives. And from these chats, I have come away with two basic beliefs:

1. Imaging ain’t what it used to be; and
2. It probably never was.

A Different Kind of Capture
It’s purely lucky that as I sat down to write up the notes from my recent interviews, an unexpected present arrived. This year’s anticipated "Worldwide Document Capture Software Market 2006-2010" report by Harvey Spencer Associates (HSA) has just been published. Anyone who knows Harvey knows that he watches and understands the document capture and forms processing markets better than anyone else on the planet. Therefore, his observations usually set the stage (and probably the mood around the office) at every imaging vendor out there for the year.

I’m here to tell you that the mood is hunky dory; I can hear the champagne flutes clinking from here.

According to HSA, in 2006 the overall document capture market grew at a "healthy" 16.6% and that growth "should be sustainable for the foreseeable future." Continuing: "The market is being driven by increasing demand for data, to support governmental compliance, privacy needs and other regulations, as well as from corporations looking for cost savings and a competitive edge," says the press release on the report.

This is a radical, comprehensive interpretation of the role of imaging. Harvey’s team is saying, in effect, that document capture has infiltrated—expanded, really—from mere "data input" into functioning at many strategic levels in the organization as well. Whatever it is, imaging has become a heck of a lot more valuable to an organization than emptying out file cabinets and storage boxes.

Wasn’t always the case. Toni Eddleman, senior strategic marketing manager at EMC, reminds me that document capture has only recently reversed its fortune, and has consequently gained several new value propositions along the way.

"Image and capture have changed significantly," says Toni. "The whole picture has rounded out. Now the capture process is tightly integrated with business process management and records management through to archive."

From this holistic view of "the document lifecycle," the whole subject of document capture rises to a higher profile. "At first, people just wanted to get rid of the paper. Then they realized that the information they were capturing (at great expense,
by the way) was stored in various silos where the capture was taking place. Only a handful of people could get access to the documents," says Toni.

That has changed. "People are now opening up the entire information infrastructure to include scanning and capture."

Old School; New Tricks
Support for this notion also comes from a rather unexpected source, albeit with a few slight spins on the specific approaches its customers can take.

Iron Mountain is decidedly old-school; a "box-on-shelf" archival storage company is how Chris Churchill, Iron Mountain’s vice president of document management solutions, describes his company’s reputation. But even an old-school vendor can learn new tricks, and Iron Mountain is a great example.

"We used to get involved only at the end of the useful life of the document," says Chris. "An HR document after the employee leaves, for example. But increasingly, our customers are asking us to manage information earlier in the lifecycle. For instance, we used to take over healthcare records after a couple years. Now, they want us to take them over after one year, or six months. Or, in fact, they say ‘why don’t you just take the whole fileroom over?’"

What’s driving such an extreme shift in this venerable archive company’s position within the information food chain? Money, of course.

"If there is no immediate business value to a document, it should be stored physically. It’s cheaper. At 10 cents a page, it would cost $200 to convert a box of paper documents. We’ll store it for $5 per year. You can store it an awfully long time and still never justify the cost of conversion. Besides, once you convert it, it still costs money to store it electronically. I’ve never seen the numbers work when you’re converting documents to digital purely to avoid storage costs," says Chris. "So there has to be a business purpose to convert a paper document. These purposes range widely; disaster recovery; facilitating distributed access or facilitating a business process that is managed electronically, such as processing a mortgage or hiring a new employee."

Iron Mountain has adapted to a changing environment. It perfected physical archive storage—huge storerooms of aging documents. Along the way, it learned a thing or two about indexing and retrieving documents...and more importantly, portions of documents—the key pages that you just HAVE to get back from the storeroom. Why not apply that to a new paradigm of capture: "intelligent capture"?

"A customer thinking about an ECM solution has two challenges. One is implementing and customizing the technology itself. Just getting it up and running is not trivial," says Chris. "The second challenge: they still have business processes based on paper documents. So in order to have a consistent process with the new ECM system, they need to image every document that comes in. AND they need certain of their old documents converted also.

"But it’s too expensive to convert 100% of existing physical documents. So we store the physical documents, and if access is required, we image and deliver it to their new document management system for them," explains Chris.