The Future of Documents

Nice initiative: test drive some of the latest Xerox Innovation  – Open Xerox is an Open Innovation space to explore Xerox technologies, interact with Xerox scientists, or even establish innovation partnerships.

Currently only one demo is available online – Natural Language Color Editing. This technology lets user use common words and phrases to change and improve color images – no need for advanced photo editing skills and tools. Nice example of making very complex technology much simpler to use and accessible, with a simpler version being part of the Xerox 7500 color printer driver.

The ways of “cutting through the clutter” and surviving the information overload have changed: after trying to impose a  structure on data by adding metadata, we quickly realized that was helpless and would not scale up if front of the explosion of the Digital Universe. Instead, we decided to (barely)  keep head over water by using whatever techniques were available to search for the content we’re looking for in that sea of documents.

This has become relatively easy for documents, even scanned. By searching for keywords, OCR and the latest indexing technologies do a fairly good job at finding the information we need – provided we can make that search the right way.

But the next frontier lies in more complex, richer documents, such as pictures or videos. But there also, searching by content is finally becoming (relatively) mainstream.

I recently blogged about this research project where images can be searched for similar content, but this capability is now coming out of the labs. Gazopa, for example, is entering open beta stage.This plug-in allows you to search for a similar picture which has been indexed, or even create a drawing, and find similar images. Google Similar Images allows you to do the same, although the original image you search from needs to be indexed ahead of time. Even more interesting, Google’s latest Picasa version lets you index individual elements of a picture, such as faces, and then search for other occurences of that face throughout your collection.

Does it really work? I’ll let you test it for yourself – my personal experience has been relatively mixed. However, I have no doubt they will shortly improve significantly, causing a paradigm shift in the way we deal with information overload.

The conference was really interesting. I was honored, thrilled (and intimidated) to be presenting along Chief Innovation Officers, Strategy VPs, and other such great presenters.

The focus was on understanding how to drive innovation into any organization – either using a top-down strategy, or, as in my case, in a bottom-up fashion. Although my presentation was outside the ”core”, I felt it was successful and very well received. Indeed, the world of “Services” (as in Professional Services) has different challenges from more traditional industries, such as repeatability and shorter cycle times. But it made my participation even more relevant and thought-provoking - and the use case of our Smarter Document Management Technologies, including Hybrid Categorizer, in which we have been able to accelerate and reuse a number of world-class innovations from Xerox research, really struck a chord.

But it was a great opportunity for learning, too, and some of the approaches or initiatives that were presented (e.g. ”Innovation Bootcamps”) were very interesting. My take on it? There is no magic recipe, but requires a mix of culture, top-down processes and ad-hoc, bottom up initiatves.

Getting ready for my presentation at Optimizing Innovation ‘09, Thursday morning, in NYC. Should be an interesting story on how the “Less Paper Office” meets Business Process Improvement.

Promises to be an interesting conference: “Optimizing Innovation 2009 will give you the opportunity to hear ideas and experiences from top speakers from the most innovative companies, on the most current and exciting topics in the form of social networking activities, brainstorming sessions, talking circles, keynote case studies and insightful presentations”.

If you happen are in the Big Apple, and want to drop at – or will be at the conference itself, don’t hesitate to come meet me in person!

Technology can help in many document-intensive processes – even sometimes in the most difficult cases, where human was until now considered the only option. For example, Xerox Litigation Services is now leveraging Categorix, the Text Categorizer,to expedite the review of documents in a litigation case.

Categorix is a technology developed at the Xerox Research Centre Europe, which uses the textual information in a document. Machine-Learning based, it learns from a number of samples the vocabulary which is representative of each class it has to deal with (here “responsive” vs “non-responsive). Once trained, it can identify “responsive” documents with an accuracy actually higher than the human, and automate the typical review process by automatically tagging the documents where it is confident enough – leaving the more uncertain ones for human confirmation.

When considering a typical litigation involves a million documents, with average review costs around $1, such a technology can accrue major savings – not to mention speed and consistency, of course.

I’ll be presenting at the Optimizing Innovation conference next week in NYC.

Under the theme of “Succeeding through Service Innovation”, I’ll be talking to how we are making the “Less Paper Office” a reality for our customers - reducing cost, improving productivity and quality, and driving sustainability into our clients paper-intensive document processes. I will be sharing some insights on Smarter Document Technologies, and how to leverage best-of-breed innovation from world-renowned labs (Xerox, of course!) and focus research creativity to come up with new, repeatable but disruptive service offerings – while making sure this innovation corresponds to the customer, of course.

Feel free to join me or catch me up if you are around! The full program can be found there, but is not fully up to date – please note my talk is now scheduled for 9:30am on October 22nd.

 The Stimulus package is definitely a great incentive for getting small practices and large hospitals to move towards Electronic Medical Records – despite a pretty high upfront cost of around $44000 per physician to install a new electronic health-record system. Daily Finance has an interesting article and interview on a new trend: ad-sponsored online health records.

Practice Fusion, a small start-up, has an interesting approach of making that service free but ad-sponsored. Their software is web- and cloud-based (partners of Salesforce.com), meaning doctors don’t have to worry about setting up the software. Even better, it can be free, provided doctors agree to have ads appear on their record system.  Practice Fusion provides interesting capabilities, like automatic charting, patient management, ePrescription, scheduling and billing.

One thing that leaves me a bit uncomfortable with many of these proposals is the gap between past and present (paper) and future (full digital), and the deliberate avoidance of the hardest problem - getting legacy paper records accessible in the new system. Sure, new paper documents can be scanned and imported as images, but what about the legacy volume of documents still sitting in folders? How can you extract and inject them into an electronic Medical Record system, while making sure this information can be searched, accessed and retrieved easily?

I visited one of our customers recently, who has a huge warehouse of over a million Medical Records folders -  scary experience, especially when thinking that my life might depend, one day, on the speedy access to the right information contained in that 200 pages folder, sitting with another million folders …

So how do you intelligently scan the legacy medical record and recreate an intelligent, electronic version is navigable, searchable, and brings as much information to the doctor -and hopefully more- as the physical paper record? That is, to me, the toughest problem. I’ll be touching on some of these aspects in the future.

The big news in e-books this week is obviously the launch of Kindle to the rest of the world - obviously. Kindle Review has all the information you might need, including review, international wireless coverage, or even a comparison between the Kindle international and Kindle US - although the conclusion is pretty obvious.

Sure, lots of other stuff has happened, amongst which iRex’s new product, being delivered by Best Buy. But to me, the most important recent news in e-book is a bit older: for the first time, the Kindle edition of a major book outsells hardcovers on Amazon! And not a small book, for that matter – Dan Brown’s books are usually very popular. We’re really at a tipping point in book and document history, and its transition to digital media.

Nuance announced yesterday that it acquired eCopy, a leading provider of solutions integrating paper documents into business software applications, for about $54 million in stock.

That extends Nuance’s footprint in owning paper- and document-intensive business processes. This acquisition should complement nicely their desktop scanning applications and Intelligent Document Recognition technologies with eCopy’s server-based offering and direct access to workflows from Multifunction Printers, as well as connectivity into over 100 entreprise ECM and ERP systems.

Nuance is on an aggressive acquisition strategy, as they already acquired another (smaller) company in that space a few months ago, ScanFlowStore, and is in line with a global consolidation trend in document management and processing.

Interesting post from Mark McDonald, at Gartner, about the (mis)use of the term ”living document”: Why most ‘living documents’ are dead on arrival”.

He makes very interesting (and true) points about the fact that “living documents”, or what we call as such today - often excuses for unfinished work. “living documents” rarely live on, and are – at best – updated on a best effort mode – “zombie” documents. They require human efforts to keep them alive, and that is the weak link.

But there are technologies on the horizon that should bring the “living document” closer to reality. Future electronic documents will not be self-contained documents anymore, but instead smaller document elements collected here and there and pulled at the time of need - evergreen mash-ups of atomic information content pulled as required, and integrated into a unified, customized view.

Cloud Computing will be a great enabler for “living documents”. See Zoho docs for example – each document can integrate bits and pieces from other documents (e.g. a spreadsheet, a slide, etc…) and if the original source document is updated, your “living document” gets updated. When there is no connectivity to the cloud, a “local” version of the document will still be available, with whatever latest sync was retrieved, as in Sliderocket. And, when the electronic documents really starts to live, the paper document will remain ”dead” for a while.  But it might contain additional information, such as a machine-readable hyperlink to provide easy access to the latest version of the documents, with highlights showing the recent updates?

So technology can help bring documents to life. The real question is, will human accept that, if that removes “living document” excuse for not finishing their work?.