High Availability And Document Imaging - Technology Information

Computer Technology Review, March, 2001 by Christine Chudnow

Imaged documents can refer to any number of elements, including myriad file types, scanned hard copies, digitized speech and videos, freeze frames, digital photographs, multimedia objects, and meta-data.

According to Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer, CEO of Project Consult, not only are electronic documents challenging because of their variety and complexity, but also because of potential abuses. For example, there is a distinct possibility of illegally or mistakenly altering data in EDP systems. There must be checks in place such as digital signatures to ensure the documents accurately reproduce the state, composition, form, and content they had when created. In addition, dynamic links, automatic document updates, context changes, and document assembly all pose their own challenges for management systems and further increase imaging's already large storage needs.

A primary example of the difficulty in managing imaged information is the requirements for CRM, Customer Relationship Management. Many different electronic and imaged documents might exist for a single customer: invoices, bills of shipping, activity reports, data mining graphs. Further, this distributed information set is spread over the entire organization, in different departments, different applications and platforms, and paper filing systems. Many organizations are now requesting single access points to customer sets of information, defining "customer" as any designation that works for them--customer, student, patient. In this case, organizations such as Minolta Information Systems encourage organizations to combine computer report technology (ERM), imaging, and electronic document management to combine all their documents in one place.

In response to these challenges, the document imaging market is evolving from a basic storage and retrieval application to Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS), which manages images, associated text, and data files, and enhances workflow. EDMS digitizes, indexes, stores, processes, and retrieves document images, which are configured to meet individual work process needs.

Document Imaging And Storage

With all these images lying around, demand grows even more for system and storage resources. Image files are large, their associated databases track large numbers of records, and imaging functions such as OCR, image display, and searching require extensive computing power. Though the reality is that most document management systems are currently decentralized throughout widely distributed applications, the process is becoming integrated into IT.

In an acquisition centered around the need for storage strategies, Kodak recently acquired storage and services expert Bell & Howell to expand its product offerings for its document imaging division. "Storage has been growing enormously, particularly with the growth of email, the Internet, and electronic documents," says Rob McBratney, Bell & Howell Imaging's vice president of strategy, marketing, & product development. "Storage fits nicely with document imaging." I should say. A number of vertical markets particularly require strong document imaging availability and storage, including customer service, healthcare, education (primarily universities and colleges), state and local government, banking, insurance, and law enforcement.

Archive Builders of Manhattan Beach, California put document imaging storage needs into black and white (See Table).

According to Steve Gilheany of Archive Builders, storage costs are very often less than ten percent of the cost of a document management system. He believes that as the cost of storage continues to decline, driven by technical advances, storage costs will become inconsequential in document management planning. The continuing cost decline may bring many other document forms into records management, including video, digital photographs, voice mail, and telemetry data from research, manufacturing equipment, and exploration.

Two factors influence the selection of storage components in document imaging and management: (1) how long the images need to be stored and (2) how often the images need to be retrieved. Some images will need to be stored indefinitely, such as financial and medical records, but may not require immediate access. These types of images have largely been stored using optical means, though tape is proving to be a much more affordable technology. SANs with virtualization abilities are one solution to providing imaging storage as the document elements are usually large, may be frequently accessed in CRM and EDMS, and represent a number of disparate elements that need to be easily retrieved and organized.

Future Availability

A huge question in document imaging is how available that information will be in the future. This is known as digital preservation, and the question is: if we must store some electronic documents indefinitely, can we access them indefinitely? Right now, the answer is no. The future of digital preservation is murky, and few experts agree on the solution. Most solutions are at the theory level even now, though incremental backup and data migration solutions exist as storage devices and media begin to age. However, migration is error-prone and expensive, with estimates of up to 2.5 times the cost of creating the original information.