Imaging Systems

Imaging is one of the oldest forms of ECM solutions. Since the 80s, many vendors built products and systems to digitize and manage paper documents. Later these vendors added workflow capabilities to the imaging systems and made organizations realize the power of electronic documents moving seamlessly to complete business transactions. While the western world has gotten used to imaging and workflow systems for a while now, emerging countries are still looking at the problem of handling paper documents. Though players in the ECM market no longer choose to call an imaging system by that name, the need for such systems is higher today than for any other ECM sub-system. In fact, an imaging solution implementation is considered as the first step towards putting together a content-enabled organization.

Imaging is nothing but scanning paper documents into an electronic format. Typically paper is scanned to a TIFF image or a PDF document. A set of metadata is then associated with the scanned image and sent to a repository application. The process of associating metadata to images is often referred to as indexing. The repository application stores the images and the metadata and maintains the relationship between them. Users are allowed to search for the images using the indexed metadata. This is the simplest form of ECM and does scan, store, and retrieve of paper based information.

Over the past two decades imaging systems also went through many makeovers. Many early systems had tight integration between scanning and repositories, over the years these systems got separated. In fact they became separate lines of businesses for many vendors. Scanning systems graduated into Capture systems with the additions of capture workflows, manual and automated indexing modules, centralized and distributed processing capabilities, and support for multiple repository products. Repositories got complex as well with scaling and robustness enhancements, serving content on the web, and increased security and access control mechanisms.

Of late I have been involved in many ECM implementations where the thrust was on scanning paper documents and making them available within the extended customer organization seamlessly. Though the terminologies used for these systems now are Information Capture and Content Management Systems, the principles remain the same as what was envisaged in the 80s.

There are umpteen products out there which are capable of handling the challenges posed by a modern day organization. But it is the lack of professionals who can apply common sense that is crippling many of the enterprise implementations. Implementing a Content Management System is still an art and there are not many such artists available in the part of the world that I live in.

ECM for a start

This blog is all about ECM (Enterprise Content Management). I got into this domain accidently about 12 years back and stuck with it almost forever. Like any other technology vertical, ECM also has far too many facets. My comfort zones are content and process management, records management, and digital assets management.

AIIM, the premier ECM industry association, defines  Enterprise Content Management (ECM) as the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization’s unstructured information, wherever that information exists.

ECM, according to me, is all about managing unstructured information and making it available to business transactions. Structured information is data that is defined with attributes and are kept in transactional information systems. Plainly, all the data you can put into database tables and search for is structured information. Anything else could fall into the unstructured category. This could include paper documents, office documents, emails, faxes, images, audio, video etc. Statistically, about 20% of all information that an organization deals with fall into the structured category. This means that a huge load of information lies in unstructured format and it is always difficult to search for and retrieve. ECM fits right there.

ECM is a matured industry with thousands of players present across market bands. While the small and medium segments are crowded with plenty of product vendors, the enterprise segment saw major consolidations in the past couple of years. The discussions in this forum is aimed primarily at the enterprise segment which is dominated by IBM FileNet, EMC Documentum, OpenText, Oracle, Interwoven, Vignette and of course Microsoft SharePoint. Other interesting options would be Alfresco and SpringCM.

ECM technologies and products are always complemented by Capture, DW & BI, and DRM. It would be interesting to hear from experts on how these technology solutions can co-exist with ECM.

If you are interested in contributing to these discussions, please post a comment and will be more than glad to invite you as an author.