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When I was just a document imaging jockey I thought everything started with a scan and ended with high quality electronic files or data streams exported.  I soon realized that getting people to scan, or even recognize the paper in their hands was like pulling teeth.  I also discovered that once the data was exported the processes that followed were either slammed with new content and not prepared, or did not mesh with the final result set.

These realizations forced me to come to the conclusion that if I want to truly be a subject matter expert in capture, I needed to know what happens before, and why, and what happens after and why.  Boy did I open a can of worms.  It did not take me long to learn that the hurdles to even begin scanning need to be addressed, and the business processes that scanning feeds are more important than the scanning process that feeds them.

You can capture content, but can you organize it?  Do you really know what you are doing, now that you are rapidly feeding some repository with valuable data?  Organizations that have well defined repository configurations halt capture processes because capture solutions don’t meet the requirements.  Organizations that do not have well defined repositories and practices, are allowing capture to create them and dictate how business is done.  Neither situation is good.  One hinders progress; the other hinders long term success.

Forget about capture, think about your users, think about the end result.  The ultimate goal and the future is information at our fingertips.  But you have to know what the fingertips want!  They are picky. You also have to be ready to tell them what the right thing is and why it benefits them.  Less typing of course.

As a technologist I can tell you confidently that the technology exists, but most are not ready for it.  Being ready has to do with a lot of introspection.  Why do we do what we do?  Do we really know how to organize content?  Are our systems benefiting us or hurting us?  My guess is for most organizations the answers to these questions are “I don’t know”, “oh hells no”, and “hurting us”.

The future is about streamlining, and everything with a purpose.  Before adding something new, make what you already have very concise and concrete.  Both in form, and methodology.  First know how to organize, categorize, and make sure your users are doing it.  If you don’t have meta-data management or a taxonomy, you have no business capturing documents in high volume.  Do you know how you name documents?  Do your users?  Maybe your strategy is not categorize content, but searching for it.  That is fine, but did you design an iron clad search system? Does your content facilitate search or hinder it?

Only in a blog post do I have the nerve ( that is a lie ) to tell you, you probably are not ready for capture.  The biggest reasons organizations fail in adopting technology, is they assume the vendors know how they run their business, and they assume they are ready for it.  Failure almost never has to do with the technology itself.  Organizations, it’s time to qualify yourself before any technology.  Discovering problems after you have opened the fire hose of massive document and data imports will be a lot more painful, I assure you.