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It’s important to differentiate between the Technology and the Technologist. I have been thinking about this for quite a while. Then, as he is wont to do, Chris Brogan summed it up perfectly with his post about Hemmingway’s Pencils.

As usual … Spot on Chris.

You are right. I don’t think anyone ever took a close look at the pencils Hemmingway used to write his great novels. Why? Because it was not important. The pencils were just a tool.

Sometimes it’s easy to get confused between the technology and the technologist. However, with a little thinking it’s easy to step back and remember that the technology is just a tool. A means to an end.

This is also true with Scanners and Scanning.

A scanner is just a tool. Albeit a fancy and occasionally expensive tool, but a tool nonetheless.

While Scanning is a verb. That is, the act of putting a scanner to work. Typically, the act and action of scanning involves people. This is where the magic happens.  As I wrote about in my post The Other Side of the Scanner it’s important to remember that people are the key to this process. People are typically the ultimate recipient of the “work” that is done by the tool (i.e. The Scanner)

True, a scanner can ingest hundreds of pages per minute and can do fancy things like read machine and hand printed text and do advanced form processing.

Keep in mind - The technology is just the enabler. As Lawrence Wischerth asked in his AIIM Capture Community blog post To Scan or Not to Scan it is possible to find a tool to do almost any task imaginable. The question is … should you spend the time to do that task.

If you do decide that it’s important enough to do the task … remember to differentiate between the scanner and the scanning.