Invisible in the Everyday

But for many people, it became more about the process and less about the technology. We championed that—ImagingWorld magazine became KMWorld magazine. And as our attention was directed toward the business processes and the value to be derived from the content, we came to take image capture for granted. Here's what I said about the same subject last year:

The imaging marketplace, for me anyway, seemed to be concerned mainly with scan and store, making it a mostly custodial task that didn't fit my impression of what business-performance improvement is all about. When the consolidation and commoditization of imaging software and hardware tools began, it looked pretty bleak. When scanners started to show up at Wal-Mart, it was all over.

We finally forgot about those darn filing cabinets. They're still there; they just disappeared into the everyday.

"We're still trying to get rid of filing cabinets." That's what Naomi Miller, director of solutions marketing for EMC Software, said when I told her this story. "Three years ago we noticed a funny thing: about 50% of our engagements were Web content management-related, but the other half had paper document—imaging—requirements. And we weren't even focused on that at the time. But we said, ‘maybe there's something to this imaging stuff.'"

Indeed. The "we" Naomi is referring to is Documentum, who certainly should know. Documentum has been up to its armpits in document management for years. Then Documentum was acquired by EMC, the storage giant. And just a couple months ago, EMC added Captiva, an imaging company to the fold. Which all makes an interesting story when you stop to think about the imaging market and its viability, which I am doing right now in this press room at the AIIM show in Philadelphia.

The common arc is for imaging and document management companies to aspire toward ECM. But this is the story turned backwards.

"Yes, we're going the other way," laughed Naomi. "A few years ago, I asked: ‘Haven't we sold all the imaging that can be sold? Doesn't everyone already scan all their paper?' But I was soon educated about how much scanning was yet to be sold. I can't believe how much imaging we've supplied in the brief time since we acquired Captiva."

Isn't it somehow passé to call it imaging? I asked. Don't you want to make it sound sexier? "We're actually not sure what to call what we're selling," admitted Naomi. "The term we're using for it is document and image processing. We're trying to indicate it's more than just scanning paper—it includes the entire electronic aspect of document management, but it's really about the processing and the BPM. The automating of your business process is what gives you the ROI."

I wondered whether this is just workflow—or even less politically correct, re-engineering—dressed up in new clothes. "There's a difference between BPM and workflow," explained Naomi. "One example is that instead of having to presuppose who needs to do what (as with workflow), you set up queues that are prioritized and load balanced, then you assign a number of people to these queues. This way you can dynamically readjust who's working on which task."

And she's right. The old concept of "reengineering workflows" lost favor when it was determined to be simply paving the cow paths—automating processes without necessarily improving the processes. Nowadays, it's impossible to presuppose anything, which, of course, is one of the basic tenets of knowledge management: We don't know what we don't know.

"That's right," Naomi agreed. "When you automate a process with BPM, you never know what kind of content you're going to need to support it. You may need COLD reports, images, XML feeds, Word documents. That's what's capturing the imagination of customers."

She continued: "We now have an earlier conversation with the customer regarding the capabilities capture brings to the table, when integrated with content and records management, and attached to a retention policy, etc. The whole end-to-end message seems to resonate with customers.

"Capture everything—whether it's paper or electronic—process as much as you can early on in an automated fashion and be smart about how you optimize your storage...take advantage of a tiered storage plan so you can pay less for your archives."

So the strategy of a storage company gobbling up document management and then capture starts to become clearer. It's all about making the various technology components that formerly had to be separately implemented disappear into the process. Right?

Not so fast.

"There are some applications where it makes sense to simply capture and archive," Naomi pointed out. "Archiving is different than content management; it's a simpler demand. There may not always be a process associated with a document.

"It just depends," she continued. "If you have nine floors of backfiled patient records you want to get rid of; that's an imaging/archiving solution. If you want incoming patient documents to trigger a business process, go through various approval cycles all the way through to the insurance payer, then your so-called ‘imaging' solution is not merely an imaging system at all; it's a BPM solution that uses imaging as part of it."

Capturing everything up-front just avoids the loss of opportunity. "The danger of scanning and sending to an archive silo is that those images can never be used. But if you apply even a small amount of content management, at least you have the opportunity. A lot of times in the old way that opportunity never was available. All you could do was scan and archive. And then you're stuck."

At least these days, I suggested, storage is cheap enough that you can afford to "capture everything" just in case. "Well, it is much less expensive, but you still need to be smart about it. The people who are interested in getting information off a document and into a process don't care about the storage issue...that is true. But it matters, because there's a lot of stuff to store! If you're going to scan those nine floors of file cabinets, you're going to have to show a good return on the investment. That's where tiered storage comes into play. The retrieval time might be a second, versus sub-second. But if you're smart about where you store what, it doesn't matter."

That's why a storage company would be interested in a document management company then, correct? "Yes, so customers can be smarter about tiered storage. All ‘storage' knows about is the file name. Document or content management knows about the lifecycle demands of the business process," explained Naomi.

So as I sit here looking around at the enormous displays on this show floor, each trying to stand out as unique and differentiated, I find it ironic that the end game is actually the exact opposite. There should be no seams showing between the acquisition of information (whether through image capture or direct electronic means), the applications that use that information to accomplish the many business processes and the final resting place into which it is ultimately stored. As long as it's not a daggone filing cabinet!