About a month ago, Chris Riley wrote a post for the capture community proclaiming that ECM is bad for document imaging. I agree with much of what Chris said, and I found his take on this topic very interesting. However, I want to provide a bit of additional insight and take a closer look at why adoption has been slow and what our industry can do to promote greater traction.
Chris provided us with three different reasons why companies that can benefit from document imaging, resist it at all costs. The “lost Knowledge worker,” “what paper” and “what is ECM” scenarios were all very clear and timely situations. For whatever reason, be it planning, adoption, or feature overload, organizations that could be utilizing document imaging technology simply aren’t.
AIIM recently surveyed organizations on their capture competency, and found that while 34 percent of organizations scan documents, they only scan the image. That’s right. Once it is scanned they don’t do anything with it. The question that plagues me is why?
The roughly one-third of organizations that scan are on the right track, but there are more steps that need to be taken in order to get the most out of scanning and capture technologies. A key component to delivering value to document imaging is OCR incorporation for data extraction.Perhaps the reason organizations are not utilizing the technology in its entirety is that they simply don’t understand the value of data extraction, because in all honesty, what organization doesn’t need reliable, searchable data? With the processing functions that are available with document imaging,an image can be precisely analyzed and transferred into reliable, accurate, searchable and highly structured electronic data that is critical to business processes.
Scanning an image is really only the first step. Applying OCR is the second. Document imaging and OCR can be applied to various document structures, from fixed forms, to semi-structured documents and even completely unstructured documents. By being able to process various documents, be it questionnaires, surveys, tests, tax returns, applications, invoices, purchase orders, receipts,contracts, letters, and even articles, organizations with any kind of paperwork can significantly increase efficiency by automating their paper-based business processes.
What do you see being the primary barriers to adoption of document imaging and processing technologies? What steps can our industry take to better educate the enterprise?
#ScanningandCapture