The Future of Documents

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

This interesting article points out that XML-structured document formats such as XBRL (eXtended Business Reporting Language)  could ensure a much tighter reporting and control over financial institutions and companies – and maybe avoid the next financial crisis?

XBRL started in the late 90’s and defines a XML schema for the exchange of financial information between companies, accountants and the SEC – including “semantic” information, which can be extracted very easily.

Starting this year, larger companies will have to submit their reports in this document format which can be programatically analyzed and validated - this will be a dramatic change from the current submission of html, pdf, ascii or anything else, which SEC analysts had to parse and analyze manually, and in case of an error get back to the filers much more quickly. Plus, this information will be available to anyone else, since this is public information, for analysis and others.

“Semantic” XML-based vertical document formats will be the next wave for Document formats. HL7 or other formats in the Health Care domain will help dramatically increase the throughput and reduce the errors in Health Management. There are quite a few out there already, but the Future of Documents will be made of many of these vertical schemas which will be a dramatic element in improving Document-Intensive Business Processes.

As we have seen in many of my previous posts, color can really help augment your document. The “Less Paper Office” is not only about printing less, it’s also about printing better to make your documents more powerful – and here comes a great new way to do so.

I don’t usually blog much about Xerox machines, but the new ColorQube 9200 is a real breakthrough. It brings together Xerox’s well proven solid ink technology with very advanced Multifunction device technology, including very high-speed network connectivity, speeds up to 85 pages per minute, and a configurable / programmable User Interface (Extensible Interface Platform) that lets you scan documents directly into your business process applications. You can read more on the technology innovations such as illuminated paper path, long-life repaceable cleaning unit, and others, or even see a virtual demo here.

This new Multi-Function Device is green, too. Beyond Energy Star compliance, it also benefits from the solid ink technology benefits – smaller carbon footprint, reduced waste, and local recycling - leading to up to 90% reduction in waste.

If all this was not enough, the new ColorQube 9200 introduces a new – and cheaper! – way of printing in color. This new flexible pricing plan, based on a 3-tier model, makes you pay a price which much closely matches the actual color ink you use. In particular, this plan allows you to print much more powerful documents (Black plus Useful Color, i.e. highlight color on word documents) at the black-only rate! 

To make it even more convincing, you can even use the associated Cost Savings Calculator to simulate how much you could be saving with this new offering!

Completely printed RFIDs have been successfully used for the first time in a public project. These “smart labels” were embedded in tickets to a trade show, but also embedded as security measure for documents printed by the german government printing office.

For the first time, these were not just antennas (which are commonly printed) but active devices as well (which were so far contained in a silicon chip that is attached to the printed antenna). Completely printed RFID tags can potentially be produced at a fraction of the cost of silicon-based tags with printed antennas.

This will strongly impact the way we work with paper documents in a future – they will be fully traceable, both in paper and electronic formats. Today, In a Document 2.0 world, paper documents are a break in business processes – sure, OCR or other data such as 2D-barcodes or Dataglyphs can be extracted from documents. However, there are errors, delays and other issues, which make your business process less efficient.

In a Document 3.0 world, RFIDs might be printable by office printers on each document, making it fully traceable, at a negligible cost, and carry a reference to its electronic counterpart. Just like a document in an electronic workflow today, you will be able to track your paper document in its “physical” workflow. Is it on my boss’ desk, awaiting review, or has it been forwarded it to the next person in the review process? (or is it in a trashbin somewhere ?)