The Future of Documents

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!

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.

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

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

Good coverage by CNET.com on Your e-health future. It touches upon some of the rationales for moving Medical Records to Electronic formats – but also alludes to the major barriers, including cost, complexity, privacy, and security (and less obvious ones, such as the legal use of digital health records by insurance companies to deny membership or hike prices beyond affordability for those with existing medical conditions), while talking about the trends and regulations that affect this trend.

Interesting reading that I’ll let you discover by yourself, but in my opinion one of the main point is the mention that the advantages of electronic medical records come only if older paper records are scanned or incorporated into the new system.

This is a laborious, expensive and error-prone process, which requires technologies like Automatic Classification, Intelligent Extraction, and other advanced technologies that can extract information from this unstructured set of information. And, scanning this huge backlog of information should not be improvised - can I scan all of those records at once? Or should I scan a patient record only in preparation of an appointment, on-demand? What about all this paper trail that we’ll continue generating until Medical Records become fully electronic?  Should I use decentralized scanning, bulk scanning, or a mix of both? TYhis can of strategy is best defined with an expert in document management, who can put you on the path to the Less Paper medical office.

Just wrapped up a webcast on Money Saving Content Management Strategies. This started as a very interesting discussion with Brian Lincoln and other members of the Docushare team, on how ECM could contribute to some of the core topics covered in my blog – going “Less Paper”, being green, improving productivity – all that while cutting costs.

In this webcast, Brian covers present – working – strategies for Content Management, while I talk about some of the Future of Document Technologies that will have a strong effect – all that in 24 minutes.

In the Attachments tab, you’ll be able to (re)discover a video of Transient Paper, showing how it can be imaged using UV light, vanishes over a few hours, and can be re-printed over and over again.

Enjoy!

Interesting love and hate relationship between the U.S./state governments and paper, as reported in a few articles on Greenbiz.

On the one hand, a study of the U.S. government shows that $440 million out of the $1.3 billion, is “wasteful” or transient paper usage.

The “2009 Government Printing Report” is full of very interesting numbers and facts. For example:

•  it is estimated that a Federal Employee discards 35% of printed pages the very same day, which ends up being 2,520 pages per year – or 6.6 billion pages each year.
• 54% of the employees or not aware of the cost involved in printing.
• the main rationales for printing documents are signatures (57% of respondents), need to review / share (51%), preference towards editing on hardcopies (41%) .

More surprising facts include that 38% of respondents still use paper to file / archive, but also that Gen Y workers have almost the same behaviour towards printing paper than older generations (print and discard almost the same).Anyway, lots of interesting facts that are worth reading through.

On the other hand though, the state of Washington is leading the way towards sustainable and responsible printing by edicting a very aggressive green printing law. By using only recycled paper, enforcing double-sided printing, and launching paper conservation programs, the state wants to achieve a reduction of 30% in printing by next year, but also saving $1 million to state taxpayers, and saving around 43,000 trees and 15.7 million waters.

One thing we should note is that this “over-waste” of paper is not specific to government agencies. Many large and medium companies still do not know how much they spend on printing, and the figures are often the same order of magnitude or even above those listed above. And, it is not only about paper – it is also about carbon footprint and energy consumption of your print infrastructure, about toner usage and waste generated by the devices, and about lost efficiencies due to paper travel – all of which you can read more in the Less Paper Office White Paper.

 In any event, whether a government agency or in the private sector, you should investigate Smarter Ways to Green if you are serious about reducing your impact on the environment – while lowering cost. Click on the image below to learn more.

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!

The ECM experts panel on “The Reality of going Paperless” at AIIM 2009 is now available as podcast.

Listen to expert advice on deciding when you really need paper, setting achievable “Less Paper” goals, identifying barriers to paperless deployments, and a many other interesting topics – click here to listen to the whole podcast.

Today is Earth Day! Although you should contribute everyday, here are some special things you can do today:

5. Use Less Toner

4. Print on High Yield Paper

3. Compute your print infrastructure’s carbon footprint and react

2. Read about the Less Paper Office and implement

1. Learn about Smarter ways to Green by watching the video below (click image)