The Future of Documents

 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?.

It sounds like my enthusiasm for the Xerox-ACS acquisition was not as universally shared as I candidly hoped. Lots of reactions about it, some good, some not so much.

In any event, I am not a specialist by far, but if you want to know more about it, you can can check out this very good post: “The ACS-Xerox deal – was it a smart move?”. Excellent and very convincing material (at least to me!).

The part I like the most is a commentary from the Wall Street Journal: “Xerox hopes to marry its document technologies with ACS’s paper-heavy processing work. t can use its overseas presence to expand ACS. Xerox also is paying a reasonable price of about 13.5 times consensus fiscal 2010 earnings, well below the 29 times that Dell is paying for Perot. Investors may be overreacting. It’s not a smooth and easy road, but I am confident it will pay off.

Now that’s a big deal: Xerox is getting full speed into the Business Process Outsourcing business. This should give Xerox much more credibility and much better ownership of the downstream Business Outsourcing – a natural extension of our core competency in intelligent paper document processing, and moving up the value chain through this synergistic partnership.

That’s consistent with a number of consolidations,  such as HP-EDS last year, or Dell annoucing it would acquire Perot systems last week.

This is also a great news for the Future of Documents: firstly, because some of the technologies I have been working on are instrumental in that partnership; and secondly, because that Xerox will now have a path-to-the-sea for some of the more advanced technologies. 

As for the details, read on the announcements by MarketWatch, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, or your favorite online business magazine.

It is not yet mainstream, but e-Signature is certainly a way to realize the “Less Paper Office” – avoid printing in paper those documents that previously had to for legal reasons. This is particularly true in the mortgage industry, a very paper-intensive process, which is slowly moving towards e-signature.

Among recent news, EchoSign reached one million users for e-signatures earlier this month. EchoSign’s web-based document electronic signature service lets you append digital signatures to contracts and other business documents, store them in digital form, and manage those documents without printing them out and faxing them. A basic version of that service is available for free.

This sounds relatively small, but this little Palo-Alto based company got significant momentum from partnering with Salesforce and Zoho, among others. One of its main competitors, Docusign, claims close to 42 million electronic signatures. As these can typically be pretty long documents, that can save quite a few trees.

This interesting post: “The New Way to Work: The Future of Document Management Software“  caught my attention. Although very high-level and generic, the vision remains quite interesting – and very much in sync with my own.

This enticed me to learn more about Huddle.net, which I did not know much about yet. Huddle is a cloud-based Document Management Software, with a strong focus on collaboration. It is in the vein of some of the online tools that I reported on during my Office 2.0 coverage last year,  but with an interesting twist which might make it appealing for companies with distributed teams.

Its uploading and online editing (Word and Excel) capabilities are relatively standard, but its “project dashboard”, workflow capabilities,  and audit trail of documents, make it sound like a very good tool for small companies with intensive document processing and interaction needs. What does not hurt, too, is the included support for online collaboration, including phone and web conferencing, IM, and an interesting “Whiteboard”.

Probably an interesting player to watch in that Document 2.0 space.

Hands on experience of someone that really tried going paperless – which proves to not be so easy, but can work if you are really motivated.

Stephen Shankland at CNET’s DeepTech tells us about the barriers, tips, but also satisfactions of going paperless – or more precisely, less paper. Among the lessons learnt:

• Going paperless is a significant undertaking and should not be taken lightly, start small then grow gradually; 
• It needs a well-proven standard for your electronic archives, but also  good practices for longer-term preservation such as backup.
• At the same time, start moving some of your day-forward incoming paper flow to full digital (e.g. electronic bank statements)
• Some of these physical artifacts just cannot be totally replaced by a digital version.

The only area where I don’t fully agree with Stephen is on how much indexing is required when creating these document archives. Stephen assumes (rightly or wrongly) that search techniques will improve over time and make initial indexing or categorizaton obsolete, allowing easy search through that e-clutter. I would not be so sure about that, so I personally use searchable PDFs for all of my paper documents, and try to add metadata, tags or categorization to help later retrieval based on the content. Even though 10 years from now OCR might be close to error-proof, Finding these “statement” images in the first place might be a challenge without prior indexing – and, even worse, searching the content of pictures might still be a challenge.

Anyway, it’s always good to hear and learn from someone that went through a Near Paperless Experience

Orange, the french telecom operator, and french editor Robert Laffont announced today the first “hyperbook” - adding affordances of the Web, such as interactivity, multimedia, and collaboration, to hardcopy books. An english version of the article seems to be available here.

Titled “Le sens des choses” (”The meaning of things”), the hardcopy version of that book from Jacques Attali will include 2-D barcodes in the margin, which can be scanned from a mobile phone to access additional content such as audio and video, or discuss online some of this book’s content.

Is making paper documents more interactive a good strategy to counter e-books? Probably more of a complement, but an experiment well worth watching. The book will go on sale on September 14th.