The Future of Documents

Business Process Automation solutions provider Kofax is reinforcing its invoice processing capabilities through the acquisition of 170 Systems, a leading provider of financial process automation software. The transaction should amount to a total of $32.9 M in cash.

Headquartered in Boston, 170 Systems has around 140 employees, and a very large customer base including Bank of Montreal, BT, France Telecom, Sandia National Labs, Verizon Wireless, and over 150 other organizations. Its flagship product, the MarkView Financial Suite, is a proven workflow solution for invoice processing and accounts payables. 170 Systems was already using Kofax, but also EMC Captiva, as onramp for paper invoices.

It sounds like a very good move for Kofax, as it should considerably expand its Accounts Payable Offering (mostly paper-based today) with much stronger e-Invoicing capabilities. But it should also allow the UK-based company to move downstream in their customer’s business process – allowing more advanced workflow capabilities and direct integration into customer ERP systems, through 170 Systems’ SAP and Oracle’ integration.

After the Esquire magazine experiment last year, where they put an miniature e-paper display in magazines, here is something even crazier – Entertainment Weekly will embed a Pepsi video advertisement in selected issues of their magazine on Septenber 18th.

It will not quite look like paper though: the tiny video display is 2.7 mm thick, has a  320×240 resolution, and one hour of running time. Not quite the Harry Potter newspaper yet…

But hopefully, color ePaper will make this easier – and better integrated. Sipix, a unit of AU Optronics,  is scheduled to ship its first color ePaper modules in 2010. PVI, the current market leader, is not expected to have color products for 3 years.

Riding the “green” wave, ePaper is gaining a lot of momentum, despite its current limitations. The global market for e-paper products should grow by up to a CAGR of 40% over the next nine years. From just over a billion today, the market is expected to grow to $9.6 billion (77 million units) according to one study, or even $41 billion in 2018 according to another.

But are eReaders that green? I am not so sure, given that their lifetime is probably very short. I’d be interested in finding studies on the full carbon footprint for eReaders.

Fierce Content Management published an interesting interview with David Smith, Vice President for Xerox Docushare, on ECM, less paper (aka”paper-light”) - and where Xerox is playing within that space.

Interesting insight on current Xerox directions, intersection between Document Management / ECM and Entreprise 2.0, and the increasing role of scanning, workflows and ECM in our daily life – all topics that my readers should be pretty familiar with by now, and a good opportunity to replay my joint webinar on the topic:  ”Money Saving Content Management Strategies“.

Vacation are great, but you sometimes miss important news like this one.

Canon recently announced the acquisition of 17% of IRIS group SA. IRIS is a well known player in Intelligent Document Recognition, but also to some extent in Entreprise Content Management. Canon and IRIS had started their relationship around IRIS’s latest scanning software suite, which is used for electronic archiving and compression.

This is another example of a traditional hardware (print and scan-) company moving into document management solutions, and enabling a tighter connection between their Multi-Function Devices / scanners and their customer’s paper-intensive workflows. The next logical step might be, just like Xerox Global Services, to strengthen its Services offering beyond simple Managed Print Services, into Pofessional Document and Business Process Services, including generic Imaging and Document Management Services, or more specialized services such as Client Acquisition and Lifecycle Management, Finance and Administration Services, or Mortgage Services.

It is interesting to compare with Océ, who moved the opposite direction by selling its Océ Document Technologies to Captaris about 1.5 years back.

So, which model is right – Océ moving away, or Xerox, and gradually Canon, moving into Document Management and Business Process Services? Time will tell – I have an idea, but I might be biased

There is an increasing awareness of cloud computing affordances… but also of its risks. According to this article from  FierceCIO, IT execs are increasingly aware of cloud computing services (60% of IT buyers have it on their radar screen) but also of its risks (50% of respondents have concerns about cloud computing, up from 45% in 2008).

The biggest concern is loss of control over the data – 37% in 2009 versus 28% last year. And in fact, less than 10% are currently implementing coud services. This discussion is interesting, as this is exactly some of the topics whichI raised with some of the cloud computing community during this Document 2.0 panel last year - concerns that resonated strongly with the audience.

So should you trust your documents, the lifeblood of your organization, to the cloud? Yes, I believe Document As A Service is inevitable – your document being scanned, composed, routed, stored, archived, printed or even self-updated automatically on the cloud for you. This will bring many benefits along the way such as cost, ubiquity, and processing power. But it will take a while until this becomes mainstream – and technical issues might be secondary to psychology, in fact.

Pretty interesting vision presented by Lew Tucker, VP and CTO of cloud computing at Sun Microsystems on ZDNET news.

What does it have to do with the Future of Documents? Well, I think Cloud Computing is one of the next frontiers for electronic Documents (as you might remember from blogging on events such as Office 2.0 last year). Cloud Computing will provide the infrastructure for processing, routing, storing documents in the not so distant future. But to me, this infrastructure will support my own vision of Document 3.0: this will be a ”Mash-up” of multiple sources,  evergreen (capable of retrieving more up to date information or new relevant information, self-validating (or self-retiring), self-repurposing to meet a specific reader’s interest and reading device. Far off for sure, but we need to prepare the future!

After the ODF-OOXML was, here comes another potential Format War – this time for e-Books: “Format War Clouds E-Book Horizon“, titles the Wall Street Journal.

Most major e-book stores have used  proprietary formats, but Sony’s recent move towards ePub might change the game. Although its devices (and others, e.g. the iLiad)  have supported the format for a long time, Sony Store e-books were offered in their proprietary format until now.

However, Sony will still be using DRM – using Adobe’s Content 4 proprietary solution. Which might run against Amazon’s own standard, if it gains traction. So much for a real open “standard”.

Kindle Review has its own interesting view about this article – stating that this format war might be a bit “overhyped”. They cite a survey where format concerns were only a very secondary issue.  format extremely important, and 25% consider it important.

However, I feel their viewpoint might be a bit Kindle-centric this time (maybe because Kindle is not in Europe yet!).   Portability and interchange, as we’ve learnt the hard way for Office Documents, are very important – and need to be established as soon as possible. In fact, their own poll indicates their reader tend to agree – 35% of respondents believe an open format is extremely important, and 25% consider it important.

 The broader question (or problem) might be DRM for e-books – a standard format is worthless if DRM blocks it. Why not abandon them altogether, like the music industry did?

Scribd, one of my favourite Document Sharing 2.0 technology (”Youtube for Documents”),  is showing a significant usage slowdown. Traffic has dropped by close to 50% since June’09 and keeps declining.

In this article, Scribd CEO invokes 3 main reasons. The first one is a summer dip which its competitors do not seem to feel: Docstoc and Issuu are still on the rise- although orders of magnitude lower still  (5 times less estimated traffic for Docstoc).

 It might have a bit to do with technology. Scribd introduced its new iPaper 2 technology recently, which improves the browsing interface significantly and should drive more volume; but at the same time Scribd’s new SEO filter might bring more relevant searches from search engines.

To me, it mostly has to do with the business model – and the content. Moving to a “pay” business model might have not attracted as many attendees as hoped. At the same time  -sadly – the most wanted content must have been copyrighted material, which is being removed and filtered out.

Let’s hope this dip is only temporary, because this sort of technology – and experimentations – are essential for the Future of Documents.

Back from vacation ! Feeling energized again.

Talking about energy, good old printing technologies are being used in many novel ways. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany collaborated with other German researchers to print batteries on paper-thin, flexible substrates. The prototype weight less than 1 gram, are 1-mm thick, but can produce 1.5 V per cell without using hazardous chemicals. Even better, the team claims to be on track for a 2010 product launch.

The process is a bit more complex than could be produced by an office device, as it uses lithographic-like techniques to pattern layers over layer. However, probably some day your standard office printing devices, including office or inkjet, will be able to do that.

One distant day in the Document 3.0 future, your paper document will not be passive and inactive anymore. Not only will it be trackable, e.g. through printed RFID tags; but it might even become an active, aware, self-powered device, with printed batteries, circuitry and antennas. Of course, that assumes paper is still around by then, but I am pretty sure it will…

This is the topic of my last podcast interview: “How To Succeed in a “Less Paper” World: Recommendations On How To Manage Documents In All Their Changing Forms” – a pretty ambitious title and topic, but I am sure it will be useful to many of you.

You can listen to the full podcast (which is 20 minutes)- or jump to a specific section:

• How to Succeed in a Less Paper World – listen now (4 min 47 sec)
• Working with Documents in Evolving and Multiple Formats – listen now (5 min 59 sec)
• Making Documents More Effective – listen now (5 min 47sec)
• The Future of Documents – Technological Innovations – listen now (3 min 54 sec)

As I will be away two weeks, you should have more than enough time to listen to all of it