CD-R chiving to the rescue

Emedia Professional, June, 1998 by Mark Fritz

Though the database continues to be an essential business tool, companies are beginning to realize that most of their information overload may be attributed to documents, rather than data.

Mountains of information--90 percent of which is paper-based--are constantly threatening to bury otherwise thriving businesses. MCI Network Services, for instance, processes more than 600,000 pages of phone bills each month that must be accessible for seven years to satisfy FCC and IRS regulations. Boeing, another information-plagued company, generated eight million contract, manufacturing, and engineering documents while building the electrical power system for NASA's new space station. And First Data Corporation of Omaha, Nebraska, must manage 200 million credit card statements totalling 2.5 billion pages every month.

Even small and medium-sized businesses are not immune to this type of information overload. From small community hospitals swamped with patient records, bills, insurance claims, and drug documentation to law firms inundated with depositions, briefs, contracts, wills, and affidavits, information management isn't what it used to be.

In the past, the solution of choice was the database. Though it continues to be an essential business tool, companies an beginning to realize that most of their information overload may be attributed to documents--including memos, faxes, email, bills, invoices, HTML files, TIFF images, and even proprietary files like PowerPoint presentations, AutoCAD drawings, and Excel spreadsheets--rather than data. This type of material, which can't be reduced to fields and records and shoehorned into a traditional relational database like dBASE or Microsoft Access, is often referred to as "unstructured data."

The problem of managing such unstructured data has led to the birth and growth of the field of software solutions known as document management. The term encompasses several subcategories, including document imaging (involving scanning and Optical Character Recognition) and COLD (Computer Output to Laserdisc).

Document management is particularly appealing to companies large and small because it converts analog paper to digital data that can be indexed and accessed in an "intelligent," topic-specific fashion. Likewise, the timeliness of digital delivery grants users the added benefit of a streamlined search process, which, in turn, leads to higher productivity. Boasts Greg Schoemer, Vice President of ALOS Micrographics, "I can walk into any office, install DocuWare--our company's document management tool--and improve efficiency by at least 25 percent."

SO WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT HERE? DEFINING THE TERMINOLOGY

One important part of the document management puzzle--especially for smaller businesses--is archiving, which can be seen as a subset of document management. Many people confuse these terms since the definition of document management has changed rapidly and frequently over the years. "Document management used to cover the whole process of scanning, viewing, and retrieving and printing documents, but the definition has evolved," says Dan Lucarini, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for Information Management Research (IMR). "It now means workflow. Specifically, document management refers to moving a live document through a company."

"When documents are altered in some way and then moved along to other users, that's document management," says Carl Meyering, CEO of Computer Backup Corporation, in Harper Woods, Michigan. Archiving, on the other hand, "uses software to freeze a document in its original form onto a CD. When you think about CDs replacing filing cabinets," Meyering adds, "that's archiving."

Ray Jones, President of Mercer Island, Washington-based Archive Retrieval says the cost of document management/ archiving software can be justified almost entirely by the office space saved. Having reduced this advantage to a formula, Jones figures that one CD can hold the contents of one entire filing cabinet--roughly 10,000 to 15,000 pages. Each filing cabinet requires about ten square feet of office space, and commercial office space in his locality (Seattle) runs about $30 per square foot per year. Multiply 30 times ten and you discover that one filing cabinet costs Seattle companies around $300 per year in rental space.

Using this formula, Jones recently helped a potential client company realize it could save over $90,000 a year by replacing its 310 filing cabinets with a workstation running archiving software. This space-saving advantage also applies to companies that own their buildings. Jones says he recently spoke with a client whose architect told them that if they wanted to add any more filing cabinets to their file storage room, they'd have to add steel beams to reinforce the floor at the cost of $500,000. The company opted for a document management system instead.

While CD-R technology has not been widely used in document management, it has become incredibly popular in archiving. Workflow, for instance, demands immediate access to mission-critical information, and is best managed by magnetic storage systems like RAIDs. In archiving, though, a 30-second wait for the jukebox to access the appropriate CD is perfectly acceptable. So while CD-ROMs slow access speed limits its popularity in the workflow area of document management, it remains suitable for archiving.