DOCUMENT Magazine - April 2008 - (Page 27)

because it minimizes human involvement and, thus, the opportunity for employees to see sensitive customer data or (even mistakenly) handle it inappropriately. 33. Perhaps the single greatest enabler, however, is the fact that the disparate technologies involved now can all be readily made to work well together. It has been years since scanning and imaging were folded into “capture” and then blended into workﬂow, which, in turn, was being blended into content management. Much the same thing is now happening with legacy databases and output technologies, which are being connected to the others as we speak. Whether by direct integration or interoperability techniques, like SaaS (software as a service), this is allowing virtually all key technology stacks to readily and ﬂexibly communicate with each other as they never could before, and that’s a very good thing for process- and ﬁnance-minded executives alike. The truth of the matter is that the technology actually evolved rather nicely over the years. Scanners got faster; recognition / extraction software got better; classiﬁcation and indexing engines were made more robust; hosted services and SaaS architectures emerged to make operations and infrastructures more ﬂexible. Seamless capture, routing, fulﬁllment and delivery was, in fact, brought well within reach, and yet, many people remained unhappy. Why such a chasm between expectation and reality? The problem was that the general expectations were inappropriately set. Instead of celebrating every increase achieved in the percentage of documents properly handled, they instead focused on how far from a 100% success rate the technology continued to be. Therefore, the result was years of disappointment, a general disillusionment with the concept and a great waste of an opportunity for operational and ﬁnancial gain. It would be a shame to miss out on all that multichannel data capture has to offer because the romance of the idea interferes with the practicality of more modest but noteworthy gains. The primary advantage is that transactional processes are no longer constricted by the need to pass data from one system to another. In the not-so-distant past, information captured on electronic forms sometimes had to be printed out before it could be entered into an ERP or other back-end system. While this may seem like an extreme example by today’s technological-forward standards, in some circles (brokerages, for instance), it was a regular fact of business life. However, it is quickly becoming a distant bad memory. Convergence Is Where It’s At The Key Lesson from the Digital Mail Center Initiative In some ways, the exciting possibilities surrounding multichannel data capture echo the early pronouncements made when the digital mail center was ﬁrst postulated. The two initiatives are conceptually similar because they both stem from the desire to automatically handle a high volume of incoming material from many different sources. When the idea of a digital mail center ﬁrst hit the industry, your humble correspondent conducted the ﬁrst formal survey of the mail center opportunity back in the mid-1990s, and while the idea was thrilling and the potential seemingly enormous, it was clear — to us, anyway — that the technology had a long way to go before that potential could be realized. Unfortunately, many in the market at that time had a different view, and, as a result, spent much of the next decade lamenting what they saw as a painful lack of progress toward making the digital mail center a reality. Unlocking the door to successful multichannel data capture begins with an understanding of the technologies used to capture incoming information and how they relate to the technologies that propel the process forward from that point. Astute enterprises realize that the call center is among those technologies. This is because the call center is a major point of origin for many business transactions, and yet, it is frequently overlooked because of its roots in voice, not computer, communication. Happily, the rise of voice-over-IP is erasing this demarcation, and uniﬁed communications strategies today are properly taking their place in the sun. This growing convergence soon will overlap with the parallel convergence, noted earlier, of scanning, imaging, content management and workﬂow, and the result will be the emergence of a single system — at least in terms of function, if not by dint of formal integration — that can handle input from any source and efﬁciently support the proper responses. Steve Weissman is senior analyst at Art Plus Technology, a wholly-owned subsidiary of NEPS, LLC, and a trusted provider of communications management strategy and expertise. For more information, email him at sweissman@artplustechnology.com or call him at 617-646-4000. ■ www.DOCUMENTmedia.com april.08 document 27 http://www.DOCUMENTmedia.com http://www.DOCUMENTmedia.com http://www.DOCUMENTmedia.com http://www.DOCUMENTmedia.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Document Magazine - April 2008

Document Magazine - April 2008 Contents Editor's View The Research Desk The Response Center BPM: Improving the Way You Process Contributing Writers Mapping Out Performance Build the Context Before You Move into the House of ECM Taking On the Big 3 The Human Connection Addressing Your Addresses Don't Call Us, We'll Call You The Mulitplying Image Recognizing Accuracy New Products Calendar Advertisers

Document Magazine - April 2008

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