The Future of Documents

XPLOR Document University closed yesterday. Overall, this was a very good show. The most valuable part to me was the education and the conferences – lots of very good information and technical content – but the networking and the expo was great too. My only minus would be that the vast majority of the attendees came from the traditional “print” business, and electronic documents were not yet the main interest of a few of them.

However, most of the attendees agreed attendance was a bit low – I was lucky to have 50-60 people in my session though. The economy does not help of course, but the attendance had been declining over the last few years – the same event could gather thousands of people a few years back.

The question on everyone’s lips was how to get back the past glory of XPLOR. Personally, I think the conference and association content need to accelerate the change they have initiated- and comprehend the full document lifecycle in the entreprise, including scanning, content management and workflows. The future of customer communication print is multi-channel, and needs to include the inbound correspondence and other paper-bound intensive processes.

I got very good feedback on my Future of Documents presentation. Attendees agreed they had to ”print less, but better” (e.g. colour, personalized, etc…) and start preparing for other channels – electronic documents.

The part that resonated best with that audience was probably the demo of some of the “extreme” customization features from XMPie. One of the coolest feature is the customization of content of images – adding your name INSIDE an image, rather than adding a generic image.

Here are a few of the images that I could generate very simply using that software, with my name on a football T-shirt, a guitar… or a tattoo. Including it in your statement or bill makes it much more powerful.

But it’s not just about printing – it’s also about multiplying touch-points with the customer, and supporting multiple channels to upsell and cross-sell. Customers like receiving personalized statements, but they want the relationship to continue with electronic documents. So the next part of my demonstration, the modibank demo site, really worked well.

This shows how a custom, personalized web site (here a fictitious bank’s reward program) can be set up on-the-fly, and how a registration document can be created on-the-fly. This is real Cross-Media publishing.

But in any event, if you want to drive more business, check this out!

I will be presenting the Future of Documents at the 2009 Xplor Global Conference and Exhibition. The XPLOR Document University will take place in Tampa Bay, FL, March 4-7th 2009.

In my presentation, I will outline the document evolution process for large organizations and recommend how to eliminate an overload of paperbound processes and under-utilized assets. This process begins with a rigorous assessment of the company’s current document landscape, including documents, document processing devices and all information workflows. I will also discuss disruptive emerging document technologies that will influence the Document 2.0 world.

Here are some details on the class. Hope to meet some of you there!