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.

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.

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

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.

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