Highlights from AIIM

This year was incredibly informative year AIIM! We learned how vendors and end users are both positioning to adhere to GDPR guidelines, robotic process automation will take over a lot of the tasks that make work life weary and there was a lot of talk about corporate culture and empowerment. These were topics of discussion in both the special interest group, "Women in Information Management" (WIIM), as well as a main theme, especially with regard to generational gaps in technology utilization. 

The conference started off with an amazing collaborative workshop with, "The Ultimate Keynote Session." 
That was actually the name of it. Led by Anna Wilson and Monty Powell, two amazing artists from Nashville, we wrote a song. It was an equalizer in a room of folks with different backgrounds. AIIM attracts records managers, attorneys and technologists from a wide variety of backgrounds. There are service providers, end users, strategists and analysts, and invariably you can go from feeling like you are on top of the industry to, "I've still got so much to learn", in a few hours.  Using music and songwriting as a way to bridge the gaps in everyone's learning curve was a hilarious way to get the conference started. Along the way, they offered some general rules of engagement in collaboration that were transferable to the rest of the sessions in the conference. The chorus went like this:

Intelligent information management

If you ain’t pointing the way, you’re just a Luddite intransigent

Because as different as we all seem

We all rely on technology

And at AIIM our aim is to lead the way. . .

YES! We actually got to use the word "intransigent" in a song!

The Solution Showcase

In the solution showcase, the most apparent difference was the lack of hardware manufacturers in the standard document scanning line. I saw two specialized (high volume) vendors, and two desktop models, but the general mid-volume/workgroup space wasn't well represented at all. This is one of the fascinating things about AIIM to me. It operates anywhere from two to seven years ahead of widespread adoption. While there is still plenty of work to do in the paper conversion space of general businesses, understanding what's coming at us as predicted by the information habits and patterns of people will ensure a growth path that will lead to later success. It also helps us to evaluate solutions as they become available, long before they are commoditized. 

The Sessions: GDPR, Analytics, and Culture
GDPR was a huge focus, especially for international companies. Essentially, this formalizes the protection of personal data of Europeans and aims to give control back to citizens and residents over their personal data. The fact that this coincided with the Zuckerberg testimony to congress made it even more relevant. GDPR was adopted on April 27, 2016, but goes into enforceable effect on May 25, 2018, so international companies need to ensure that there is now a single set of rules that apply across the board if they possess any information about any European citizen. According to the European Commission, "personal data is any information relating to an individual, whether it relates to his or her private, professional or public life. It can be anything from a name, a home address, a photo, an email address, bank details, posts on social networking websites, medical information, or a computer’s IP address."¹

In addition to all of the data protection,  companies are starting to use data analysis instead of document analysis where possible. Mortgage companies that offer online applications and eforms have more insight to how you answered a question, rather than simply what your answer was. For instance, not only will they know if you answered "single" or "married" for your marital status, but they will know how long it took you to answer that question. In this scenario, underwriters have found a correlation between the likelihood of defaulting on your mortgage and how long it took you to answer if you were married or not. 

 
In social media, search engines, and media sites, you can see these predictive analytics at work with targeted marketing based on preferences.  All data can be used to create a series of rules when certain criteria are met. If you buy cereal, you will likely need milk, so the rules or algorithm would present milk ads to cereal buyers. This can be applied to business logic, too. Computers can now learn how to do repetitive tasks so that humans, the most sophisticated organic computer, can be optimized to only deal with situations that can't be programmatically resolved. Humans were presented as the most powerful organic computer processor in existence. Using humans to do these repetitive tasks is an inefficient use of computing power. This translates into moving toward "designing" work instead of "doing" work. This will continue to underscore the need for companies like ours to be involved in business process mapping. 
 


On the final day, the keynote was presented by Mike Walsh, a futurist speaker, who advised that these changes aren't optional. Without going into a discussion about electronic devices for children, he eluded to the fact that predictive engines are already serving up the next video on YouTube, and so on, which is going to create a culture that expects information to be presented to them. It's rare that these kids channel surf to find something to watch. Pertinent and meaningful items are presented to them based on their recent choices, and that same level of intelligence is going to be expected in the workplace.²  

"The next generation, shaped by AI, will expect companies to predict their needs, make their interactions more personal, and be persuasive about their behaviors."

 — Mike Walsh

On a professional side, the idea of creating this kind of work environment for both our company and our clients is daunting, but doable. All these things map back to some very specific cultural components that are critical to evolving our company into its mature state.  When combined with the corporate culture exercises that I've been doing in order to grow my team, the time is right to assimilate these ideas into the framework of what Deau is.

On a personal side, I’m going to get my kid off of his iPad before he expects me to predict what he wants for dinner.

Thanks for reading!
 - Eren

 

Resources: 
¹ From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation>
² From <https://www.dropbox.com/...preview=20180412+AIIM+San+Antonio+Summary.pdf>
www.AIIM.ORG

http://www.mike-walsh.com/

http://songsessions.com/

  

The elevator ride that lifted me to "work 'smarter every year'"

It may have been some time since you last heard from me, but I'm working on a plan to make up for it along with a refresh and revamp of our marketing content. I'm excited and hope you enjoy your front row seat as we share this journey.

While Women’s History Month has come to a close, as a part of our pledge to #PressforProgress on International Women’s Day, we’re planning on continuing the celebration of successful women in information management throughout the year.  My journey into this industry began with the late Nien-Ling Wacker, founder of Laserfiche, so we found it fitting to begin by honoring her.

Our business would not be where it is today if Nien-Ling had not developed her idea of a simple, elegant document management system into a successful enterprise. I also owe some of my personal success to this visionary woman.

Over the years, I had many encounters with Nien-Ling as we connected on many fronts. She was always very warm to me and loved that I had left the corporate world to work with my father. I have many fond memories of her, but my most memorable was a 60-second elevator ride.

As I recall it, during this elevator ride she leaned over and asked:

"Tell me, will I see you on the cruise?" (The Winners Circle cruise for top resellers was scheduled to take place immediately following the conference)

"No ma'am, but we are close."

"Close?" She questioned.

"Yes. I've been working with an industry association, and Tom's been busy with the hotel."  This was his other business at the time.

She backed up in the elevator (which was packed because the annual conference had outgrown its space) and looked at me squarely in the face and said, "Laserfiche is not a hobby. It's either all you do, or not what you do."

I froze as I scoured my mind for the reason why we hadn't made it to the winner's circle yet. In that moment, what she said stung and brought tears to my 30-year-old eyes. However, it also sparked a passion in me that has been a driving force ever since. You better believe we have achieved winner's circle ever since, too!

So, here's to the woman whose name means "smarter every year" in Chinese, and to all the women in our histories who have challenged us to become our best selves. I look forward to sharing our new content as we Run Smarter.

See you later this week at the AIIM conference!

~Eren

Part 4 of 4: Business Compensation Models Move from Selling Boxes to Building a Consulting Relationship

This series makes a case for MFP and other office product dealers to reevaluate how content management offerings can play into their business model and increase their overall profitability. The first step in this is identifying the differences in the technology landscape, as well as the usage of these devices in the modern work environment. These differences can be boiled down into:

 

1.    Ergonomics and mechanics of sharing a centralized machine (bottleneck issues)

2.    Technical limitations – compression, image issues, network traffic, and automated extraction

3.    Business compensation models don't allow for consultative sales, both in refining skill sets and in practice  

For our final consideration, there is the slower to change, but still imperative need that speaks to the business models of the copier/ office supply industry.

Salesmen are typically compensated based on boxes moved, as opposed to quality of sale, and being viewed as a partner in the organization. The initial work toward partnership with a customer necessarily takes a bit longer, but will result in a tighter marriage between you and your clients. This involves understanding that there are business reasons for the use of the MFP machines, and that you can drive a more effective and comprehensive sale by taking the time to understand the business requirements and propose a more complete, soup-to-nuts solution.

While focusing on speeds and feeds as a feature of the unit you are proposing, the customer will respond better to the benefits that the solution provides. Unfortunately, this will mean that, for sales managers, they need to understand that there may be a longer ramp up process to facilitate more effective partnerships. Base salaries and training on these types of consultative sales make it a hard proposition for anyone.

That said, I propose two options for these dealers: 1) Create a template that allows for rapid adoption of the sale of the box to address " as is" needs, and 2) Propose a timeline of roll out and rolling back the use of the MFP as a printer, and positioning it more as a scanner once they are ready to adopt that methodology. Then, have a team of experts with information handling experience to do a brief study as a part of that initial sale as the customer’s content management needs grow.

Consultants, like the ones at Deau Document Scanning Solutions are available to "white box" their services, and make functionality recommendations that are product agnostic. This mitigates their risk of moving forward, and positions you for a career long relationship with the customer, all because you took a little more time on the front end.

The ultimate goal of any customer based business should be providing products and services that successfully fill a customer’s needs.  As document management technology has evolved, MFP and other office product dealers now have the greatest opportunity to adapt their business compensation models to be perceived as consultants, rather than just sales reps, and build long-term relationships with their customers by filling their evolving needs beyond the individual sale. 

Part 3 of 4: Technical Limitations are Diminishing with MFPs

This blog series will attempt to make a case for MFP and other office product dealers to reevaluate how content management offerings can play into their business model and increase their overall profitability. 

The first step in this is identifying the differences in the technology landscape, as well as the usage of these devices in the modern work environment. These differences can be boiled down to:

1. Ergonomics and mechanics of sharing a centralized machine. (bottleneck issues)
2. Technical limitations - compression, image issues, network traffic, and automated extraction
3. Business compensation models don't allow for consultative sales, both in refining skill sets and in practice.  

 

In part three of this four-part series, we'll look at how technical limitations are changing. 

The technical issues behind sharing the copier machine to scan documents have now become less problematic, as there are several issues which have also been addressed in recent years.

The first is that networks now can handle more bandwidth and traffic than ever before. Internal networks running gigabit switches are a far cry from the 10MB networks that were prevalent. Because of the way that MFPs traditionally handled image traffic, this could create a bottleneck (think fire hose quantity through a garden hose) in delivering the scanned image to the desktop of the user. In addition, MFPs are smarter now, with embedded hard drives and embedded processing engines, which means that they are sending compressed images, as opposed to the original uncompressed image which was needed for image processing later.

In addition, creating web ready images, and enhanced image processing requires grayscale images, which further increased the potential load on networks. Gradient contrasts, highlighting, and other paper handling mechanics and activities before the paper was scanned required higher resolution images to be processed, potentially through a grayscale processing engine to intelligently extract the text. 

Automated processing, which is critically important, requires a quality image, and until recently, documents weren't created with the idea that they would be scanned. Some automated processes might include bar code extraction, zonal OCR, or text extraction with pattern matching.

This brings up another point regarding the quality of the images, and speaks to the fact that paper handling now often assumes that scanning is the ultimate destination and office practices are changing with regard to how (or how often) papers are grouped together via staples, or binding, or other activities which make document preparation for scanning more time intensive and costly. 

Another drawback that precluded the use of MFPs earlier was the need to adjust settings to handle documents, which required the ability to see the image as it was scanned to ensure that a clear, readable image was produced. Now that paper handling has matured, and documents are scanned earlier in their lifecycle, batch controls (i.e., number of pages scanned, grouping documents by document types) and "rules based" routing, if the image produces unreadable text, can allow for easier quality check points. When used in an ad hoc scanning environment, this isn't as critical as a production environment, but the right methodology now gives a methodology to take advantage of the high processing speeds that a quality MFP allows.

Our next post will round out our discussion of the new landscape of opportunities for MFP and other office product dealers in the world of document/content management. 

Part 2 of 4: Ergonomics, and how people use their MFPs

As I discussed in the previous post, this series will attempt to make a case for Multi Function Printer (MFP) and other office product dealers to reevaluate how content management offerings can play into their business model and increase their overall profitability. The first step in this is identifying the differences in the technology landscape, as well as the usage of these devices in the modern work environment. These differences can be boiled down into three areas:

1. Ergonomics and mechanics of sharing a centralized machine. (bottleneck issues)
2. Technical limitations – compression, image issues, network traffic, and automated extraction
3. Business compensation models don't allow for consultative sales, both in refining skill sets and in practice  

  

I've been working in content management since 2003, but until 2008-2009, using electronic communication as a viable and formal method of business transactions was the equivalent of sending a text instead of a thank you note to your grandmother. It was fine for immediate needs, but when it came to constituting a business record, you needed to go for the hard copy.

This meant several things until recently when it came to sharing these types of resources. Because printing documents was largely used for external communications, it trumped the need to scan to email. The official document needed to be printed, and so all of the scans/ emails/etc. were conveniences but took lower priority than the business requirement to print. 

Scans were postponed while other MPF users were creating (printing) the document to which you could affix your "Wet signature".  This high demand and use for the copy machine meant that there were bottlenecks within organizations  The need to print trumped the need to scan every time.

Now, e-communications, including secure email, mortgage documents, and electronic communications in general are accepted as the  de facto  standard of communicating for all but the most high-value transactions. This is a key driver in allowing the MFP practical use as a production (though more commonly ad hoc) device to support scanning operations.

In the next post, we will explore the technical issues behind sharing the copying machine, and how they have changed, and why these changes make a difference in the efficiency with which you can scan. 

Part 1 of 4: Making the case for Multi Function Printer (MFP) dealers to re-embrace document management

Last month, speaking at the ITEX conference, I gave a presentation on ways to automate workflows within an office using distributed desktop scanners. While there, at the end of my presentation, I was approached by a guy who said “Yeah, Eren, thats great, but the reality of it is that the copier guys have been told that content management was the way to go for 10 years, but none of us have ever been able to make a go of it. Do you have a reason for why?"   Since I was there to discuss standalone scanners, I was a little nervous, but getting a nod of approval from my host, I told him. I didn't have A reason for why. I had a LOT of reasons for why.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be exploring three of those reasons in more detail, hopefully to offer a compelling, salient argument for why it didn’t work before, and why it will work now.

When I started in this industry, many things were different in the landscape. Though, technically speaking, the ability was there to scan from a copier, there were several factors that made this an ad-hoc scanning solution as opposed to a driver for production scanning and thus, document management. In these three ways the landscape has changed considerably.  To ensure continued profitability and keeping up with competition, it's time for office product dealers to rethink adopting or partnering with a company that can offer document management solutions:

So what has changed?

1. Ergonomics and mechanics of sharing a centralized machine. (bottleneck issues)
2. Technical limitations – compression, image issues, network traffic, and automated extraction
3. Business compensation models don't allow for consultative sales, both in refining skill sets and in practice  

Next week we will go into detail about the bottlenecks we used to deal with...and why we don’t anymore.

Good enough isn’t enough

I spend a lot of time on Facebook. Not always active, but it's usually in one of my Firefox tabs. Occasionally, something really hits me. Yesterday, one of my professional colleagues posted this, about 19 things to stop doing in your 20s. Number 4 spoke to me, personally and professionally. It reads:

Stop trying to get away with work that's "good enough." People notice when "good enough" is how you approach your job…

I've done this- I used to refer to it as "sinking to the top". There have been situations where I was overqualified for a task, and really only did it "good enough". It was still better than expected. There have also been times when, not understanding all that COULD be done, I failed to explore or made things harder, or more uncomfortable than they needed to be. If a simple solution met the goals, did I need to stretch to be uncomfortable? Wasn't I already too busy, especially since this was "good enough." but doesn't this also apply on a broader scale to the way that you do business?

I have gotten several calls this week from companies who say that they want to "Go Paperless" and then ask for a price to scan in their documents to a CD, DVD, or Disk. While we have the technical capability to just scan in their documents and put them on a CD or DVD, (which is what they've asked for), I am well aware that their needs are probably deeper than that. The only benefit that this allows them is reducing the space required to store these documents. That their request for service that they thought they needed was based in their ignorance of how things could be, and so rather than take their money for a job that would likely be "Good enough" and be exactly what they ask for, that I would postpone the process in order to educate them. Unfortunately, this is frustrating for some of them. They are failing to realize that while I could charge them $500.00- $1000.00 now for a down and dirty conversion job, if they don't put some planning into the architecture of how they will do this, both today, and going forward, they will end up with an electronic basement with CDs and DVDs that are haphazardly organized, if at all. This is effort put forth for something that will likely have to be redone. To handle this, I talk to them about how we need to sit down and talk. How determining how they use this data, how they need to retrieve it will allow us to structure a system that can grow with them, even if they still elect to just get us to scan their documents to a CD. At least that won't be lost when they DO decide to take the plunge.

But there is still a hesitancy to move forward with this education. Perhaps some of it is pride, and not wanting to admit that they didn't know the world of technology that now exists to support static documents. Now that technology is so mature now that it has moved from a state of capturing documents to archive to capturing documents to process, and THEN archiving them. This may be true and is understandable, but the immediate excuse is that they are "too busy" to have to think about these things. Funnily enough, there are two additional things to stop doing in your 20s that speak to this:

                    Stop being lazy by being constantly "busy."

Stop allowing yourself to be so comfortable all the time. Coming up with a list of reasons to procrastinate risky, innovative decisions offers more short-term gratification than not procrastinating. But when you stop procrastinating to make a drastic change, your list of reasons to procrastinate becomes a list of ideas about how to better navigate the risk you're taking.

The idea that there is a way of doing business that you haven't thought of yet is intimidating, but people are doing it- Lots of people. They've tested the ropes, they've broken in the systems. It's time now for the pragmatists to come on board. Yes, you've always done it that way, but there's a new way, a better way to handle things now. And this isn't going to stop. There's always going to be a new way. It might not be comfortable, but don't be lazy, and never, settle for being "Good enough". As we move into a new age of technology adoption, it's also time for the paperless office to emerge out of its proverbial "20s" and into the maturity that it now deserves.

 

 

-Eren

Thanks to thoughtcatalog.com for providing the inspiration for this post.