What's That Buzzing Sound?

Today, Apr 2004 by Bolita, Dan

This Time it's Not Just Noise

This is a good time of year. This is "show season," the time of year when vendors announce their newest offerings, customers make major purchasing decisions and TAWPI members make their plans to be at the annual Forum & Expo (June 6th-9th in Chicago). There's a building excitement that's almost audible.

The volume of news spikes this time of year, as well as the volume of noise claiming to be news. Fortunately, it appears that the balance is swinging in favor of legitimate news. In the past few weeks several key players in our market have announced mergers and acguisitions-EMC bought Documentum, Verity bought Cardiff, and OpenText bought IXOS, JP-Morgan Chase merged with BankOne. On the technology side, several software vendors and seemingly all of the scanner manufacturers have unveiled new products. (Check out announcements from IBME, Kodak, Scan-Optics and BancTec to name just a few). It's a good time to be a newshound.

There are lots of explanations for this year's buzz-an improving economy, key legislative changes, a maturing market-whatever the reason, it's a joyful noise. It's the sound of work process improvement, and it's been guiet for too long.

Part of the sound is coming from the pending Check 21 legislation, which TAWPI has made a top priority in its conference sessions and education material. (Note the special section in this issue addressing ARC and Check 21.) As the October enactment approaches, there are increasing numbers of products and services targeted to make the adoption of Check 21 a painless process for those who participate.

In the capture space, much of the sound is attributable to the long-touted "convergence" of information systems, specifically the ability to capture and classify content as it first enters an organization. Extremely powerful recognition and auto-classification tools are being integrated throughout traditional capture workflow processes. These sophisticated (almost Orwellian) tools not only recognize characters, but whole words, whole sentences and even whole concepts. If you get past the Big Brother aspect, the ability to have an automated system that understands why information is important to a business, and therefore can deliver it to the right place at the right time, it's a pretty "buzzing" notion.

Applications for human resources, financial analysis, intelligence and defense, statistical forecasting and database management all benefit from this technology. Note the businesses and processes that are choosing to come together and you'll see integrated systems that support this model of information capture, recognition, classification and distribution-all automatically.

Listen carefully to the news announcements and product demonstrations at TAWPI's conference in Chicago, or any of the events you'll attend this spring. As you, your colleagues and peers come together, you'll find that so too is the technology you're using. You can almost hear it.

Dan Bolita, ICP

Editor