Friday, May 28, 2004
New Business Climate Demands Document Guardians
Document Guardians
Today, the employees of our companies create massive amounts of data and documents. They create, store, & manage this data in a wide variety of systems. As the companies evolve through downsizing, globalization, outsourcing, mergers, etc. The ties that bind individual employees to their data are broken. Finally, changes in infrastructure cause losses of data or data that lives on eternally in a company beyond its useful lifespan. If no one in a company knows the relevance of the data, it is likely to be preserved, at considerable expense and legal risk, indefinately. In short, bureaucracies need Document Guardians.
A child is born into the guardianship of his/her parents and remains under that guardianship until they come of age. However, the State maintains the responsibility for ensuring that the minors residing in their state have guardians. This oversight responsiblity is critical because children, like corporate documents, are valuable, vunerable and ripe for exploitation. Situations and circumstances that require interventions by guardians are bound to arise if proper oversight is present.
Today, the employees of our companies create massive amounts of data and documents. They create, store, & manage this data in a wide variety of systems. As the companies evolve through downsizing, globalization, outsourcing, mergers, etc. The ties that bind individual employees to their data are broken. Finally, changes in infrastructure cause losses of data or data that lives on eternally in a company beyond its useful lifespan. If no one in a company knows the relevance of the data, it is likely to be preserved, at considerable expense and legal risk, indefinately. In short, bureaucracies need Document Guardians.
A child is born into the guardianship of his/her parents and remains under that guardianship until they come of age. However, the State maintains the responsibility for ensuring that the minors residing in their state have guardians. This oversight responsiblity is critical because children, like corporate documents, are valuable, vunerable and ripe for exploitation. Situations and circumstances that require interventions by guardians are bound to arise if proper oversight is present.
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Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Document capture—a growing market for KM
Document capture—a growing market for KM - Full Article -
By Harvey Spencer
Document capture has often been the poor, overlooked orphan of document imaging solutions. It's just not regarded as glamorous—although the fact is that some interesting and advanced KM technologies are now being applied to it. Conventional wisdom might hold that paper-based document capture software is in decline, but it has been growing consistently at more than 8% per annum, even through recessionary periods like the current one when overall IT spending growth turned negative.
In the recently available survey of the document capture market that we conducted with Strategy Partners, a United Kingdom-based analyst company, the market for software capture is set at $894 million, excluding hardware (scanner) sales and integration, and is expected to reach over $1 billion by 2006. That business rationale and technologies are fueling it?
Business documents are increasingly originated electronically, and business processes are mainly conducted electronically. Overall business paper production is gradually falling as companies convert to e-forms—mostly for internal usage now, but in the future, more and more external documents will be electronic too. It seems clear, though, that electronics will not completely replace paper due to its convenience and universal understandability even after the legal impediments are sorted out. But the low cost, speed of movement and the understanding tools that you can apply to electronics are increasing the pressure on businesses to handle all their transactions more effectively. In addition, the cost of copying and storing paper continues to increase. That is driving a need to truncate paper-based transactions as quickly as possible into electronic images while making them as usable as electronically originated ones.
Capture has evolved through a number of stages:
departmental scan and index,
batch scanning with control sheets, and
incorporation of recognition technologies—optical character recognition (OCR) and barcode—to automate the indexes.
In each case, the paper needs to be moved and prepared prior to scanning it. In the first case, the paper is distributed to the relevant department where it is opened, prepared, scanned and indexed. It is a slow and labor-intensive task resulting in maybe a half-dozen or so documents being scanned each minute.
By Harvey Spencer
Document capture has often been the poor, overlooked orphan of document imaging solutions. It's just not regarded as glamorous—although the fact is that some interesting and advanced KM technologies are now being applied to it. Conventional wisdom might hold that paper-based document capture software is in decline, but it has been growing consistently at more than 8% per annum, even through recessionary periods like the current one when overall IT spending growth turned negative.
In the recently available survey of the document capture market that we conducted with Strategy Partners, a United Kingdom-based analyst company, the market for software capture is set at $894 million, excluding hardware (scanner) sales and integration, and is expected to reach over $1 billion by 2006. That business rationale and technologies are fueling it?
Business documents are increasingly originated electronically, and business processes are mainly conducted electronically. Overall business paper production is gradually falling as companies convert to e-forms—mostly for internal usage now, but in the future, more and more external documents will be electronic too. It seems clear, though, that electronics will not completely replace paper due to its convenience and universal understandability even after the legal impediments are sorted out. But the low cost, speed of movement and the understanding tools that you can apply to electronics are increasing the pressure on businesses to handle all their transactions more effectively. In addition, the cost of copying and storing paper continues to increase. That is driving a need to truncate paper-based transactions as quickly as possible into electronic images while making them as usable as electronically originated ones.
Capture has evolved through a number of stages:
departmental scan and index,
batch scanning with control sheets, and
incorporation of recognition technologies—optical character recognition (OCR) and barcode—to automate the indexes.
In each case, the paper needs to be moved and prepared prior to scanning it. In the first case, the paper is distributed to the relevant department where it is opened, prepared, scanned and indexed. It is a slow and labor-intensive task resulting in maybe a half-dozen or so documents being scanned each minute.
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Information Categorization - Continued
How you sort information counts
The Memorial's design was selected through a national design competition open to any U.S. citizen 18 years of age or older. Ohio native Maya Ying Lin, an undergraduate at Yale University, submitted the winning entry.
The names of the deceased that appear on the Vietnam Memorial Wall are in chronological order, according to the date of casualty. Within each day, the names are alphabetized. For the dead, the date of casualty is the date they were wounded (received in combat) or injured (received in an accident); for the missing, the date they were reported to be missing.
The designer insisted on the chronological ordering of the names as an essential element of her design, despite complaints that alphabetic ordering was the obvious choice. The seemingly small difference became quite clear when a look at the records showed over 600 people with the last name of Smith. There were 16 people named James Jones. The complainers had failed to grasp the immensity of 58,229 names, ordering names alphabetically would have made the memorial as captivating as a metro phonebook. Presenting the names by casualty date emphasized individual names, placed them in the context of their deaths and marked their place in this grim tally.
The order of the sorting also gives a sense of shared lost to the families as they visit the wall. Often family members and vets become acquainted because the point at the wall they both visit represents a day when there were many casualties from the same battle. They share a common abstraction, and this sometimes leads to the sharing of knowledge.
The Memorial's design was selected through a national design competition open to any U.S. citizen 18 years of age or older. Ohio native Maya Ying Lin, an undergraduate at Yale University, submitted the winning entry.
The names of the deceased that appear on the Vietnam Memorial Wall are in chronological order, according to the date of casualty. Within each day, the names are alphabetized. For the dead, the date of casualty is the date they were wounded (received in combat) or injured (received in an accident); for the missing, the date they were reported to be missing.
The designer insisted on the chronological ordering of the names as an essential element of her design, despite complaints that alphabetic ordering was the obvious choice. The seemingly small difference became quite clear when a look at the records showed over 600 people with the last name of Smith. There were 16 people named James Jones. The complainers had failed to grasp the immensity of 58,229 names, ordering names alphabetically would have made the memorial as captivating as a metro phonebook. Presenting the names by casualty date emphasized individual names, placed them in the context of their deaths and marked their place in this grim tally.
The order of the sorting also gives a sense of shared lost to the families as they visit the wall. Often family members and vets become acquainted because the point at the wall they both visit represents a day when there were many casualties from the same battle. They share a common abstraction, and this sometimes leads to the sharing of knowledge.
