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Recognition. Having the ability to see something or someone and know what it is or who they are. We humans have this capability through lifelong learning. We start from the day we are born, learning to recognize sounds, smells and through our eyes, faces and items all around us. We are taught what and who they are by other humans and once we have stored this in our memory, we can recall it at any time. Recognition and recall in life are vital not only in our personal lives as humans but in our businesses when processing information.

Recognition has become an essential part of capture, evolving over the years from Mark Sense and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to pattern recognition allowing computers to learn and match patterns in photos, text and even voice. Recognition technologies of today have allowed us to advance our capture capabilities to new levels with an increased ability to extract relevant information we can then use as metadata to not only store but find the information we are looking for regardless of form.

In my view, recognition technologies are some of the best tools to enhance and automate your operations in the capture cycle, streamlining the overall process and increasing levels of accuracy. The argument I hear from folks who are reluctant to incorporate recognition is that no software is as accurate as a human in deciding what something is. To a degree, this is true in that it does take a human to train the software and validate the results but in the end, once the rules and references are in place, the most common of elements are quickly and efficiently processed while the human now only has to deal with the exceptions and as the software learns over time, even the exceptions become fewer.

I am not saying that recognition is the total solution to capture and data extraction nor am I saying it is the total solution to find information. What I am saying is that it is one of those elements of capture that you should seriously consider from all perspectives. This means you have to take time to assess the types of information you deal with whether text, hand print, audio, video and photos in order to choose the right technology for the job. Once you have done this, and chosen your technology, it will take some time to teach the system but in the end, the productivity gains and increased efficiency is likely to far exceed the time and effort to get there. Just as we learn and become more efficient in what we do, recognition technology when selected and used properly can work for and provide great benefit for you as well. 

If as an organization, you are ready to move forward and are finding yourself stuck or unfocused and are not sure where to begin or what to do next, seek professional assistance and/or training to get you started.

What say you? Do you have a story to tell? What are your thoughts on this topic? Do you have a topic of interest you would like discussed in this forum? Let me know.

Bob Larrivee, Director and Industry Advisor – AIIM

Email me: blarrivee@aiim.org   

Follow me on Twitter – BobLarrivee

www.aiim.org/training     

I am teaching the AIIM Capture course in Silver Spring, MD on August 23-24, 2011

I will be speaking at the following events:

• NIRMA 2011 in Las Vegas – August 15 – 17, 2011
• Sbcon11 Virtual Conference on September 8, 2011
• ARMA’11 in Washington, DC – October 17-19, 2011