Process Improvement | Capture and Imaging
When I was a young child, in an era when school papers had to be researched in libraries with card catalogs and shelves upon shelves of books, my father had the bright idea to purchase a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica. Now, we lived on a tight budget, and my mother wasn’t too thrilled with this splurge when a perfectly good library was so close to home. Dad wouldn’t hear of it! “Our girls need the best education we can offer,” so of course, mom relented.
The boxes of the beautifully bound, gold-edged books were delivered, and dad insisted they be placed right next to his reading chair. If you haven’t guessed, he wanted the encyclopedias for his own reading pleasure, to instantly satisfy his curiosity from anything mentioned on the news or PBS – and many, many times we’d see half dozen volumes open on the floor because he would devour every cross-reference each article would offer.
Here I am, decades later, just like my father. I’ll click open every link and read those referenced articles, too. I call it “going down the rabbit hole” and losing myself not in Alice’s weird and whacky Wonderland but in the crazy mix of business and intelligent information management (IIM).
I share all this to say I’m really enjoying reading and learning about newer topics abuzz in our industry— things like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, and machine learning.
I’m equally enthralled reading about topics that have been around for years, decades even, and seeing their evolution in business today. I believe that to comprehend how things like RPA, AI, and digital transformation can help a business; you first have to understand what processes and technologies they seek to improve upon.
To that end, I recommend reading how capturing and processing content, in all its forms and guises, in any organization, can be improved upon, and to benchmark your own business against where others are on in this same trek. In fact, I am at this time going through the AIIM Industry Watch entitled “Improving Business Operations in 2017: Capturing Vital Content.” Maybe you’ll go down this rabbit hole with me.
Happy reading!
