Blogs

“Hi. My name is Larry and I am an end-user”.  “Hi Larry”, the group responds………

Believe me; it takes a fair amount of courage or perhaps stupidity to acknowledge your membership in the end-user community in a public forum like this. Vendors and consultants wait anxiously and work diligently to locate and identify members of this elite community. But here I am placing a big fat bull’s eye on my back for all to see. Brave or foolish? I’ll leave it up to you to decide.

This is my inaugural blog for the AIIM Capture Community. I am looking forward to sharing ideas and experiences with you.  First, I propose that we make a pact. If you promise to keep an open mind, stay awake and actually read my blog posts, I’ll try to be informative, relevant and clever.   

So now that we have that out of the way, let’s move on to credentials. Or in other words, why should you read my blog posts. I’ve been involved in document capture for over 20 years and worked on successful initiatives for the high volume capture and indexing of paper, fax, micro-jackets/film/fiche, print output and web content. I’ve served the Banking, Financial Services and Health Insurance industries as a Project Manager, Corporate Officer, IT Director and Records Information Manager.  I’m a Past Chairman of the AIIM Board of Directors and a proud member of the AIIM Company of Fellows. 

Okay, enough about me. Let’s talk about you.  You are all Information Management professionals who share the same challenges, issues and critical decisions. Twenty years ago we all struggled with expensive “bleeding edge” technology, significant hardware and software limitations, user skepticism, a lack of acceptance by regulators and the legal system and just trying “to get things to work”. The user and vendor communities worked together to overcome many of those early challenges but along with success comes new challenges. Today, you all face a very different set of issues; regulation, privacy, security, cost containment and managing electronically stored information (ESI) by the terabyte. Cloud computing, social networking, enterprise 2.0 applications, email, messaging, and mobile computing are adding to the already complex landscape. Today the question is not simply how do I capture paper documents, but what information do I capture, what documents should I convert, how long do I keep information and how do I manage all of it.

I look forward to adding my voice to the other distinguished contributors in this Capture Community. It’s my hope that our collective wisdom will help all of you navigate through this increasingly complex landscape, make better decisions, impress your friends at parties and help you sleep a little easier at night.

Note:  Healthfirst employment is listed for identification purposes only.  Opinions expressed are personal opinions and not those of my employer.