Document Imaging in Business - Part 8: Summary and Conclusion
by: Admin
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There was a time in which the notion of 'imaging' meant any method of turning a document into a portable item, whether that meant putting it on microfiche or microfilm or even just literally photocopying it so that you had a copy to take with you. But in recent years, imaging has come to be almost completely synonymous with scanning a document in and making it digital.
That's because the very notion of document management has changed. It's simply not prudent to keep paper in a physical form, even if that means microfiche, when the digital version is easier to transport, easier to backup, and easier to manipulate. Electronic content is the lifeblood of modern business operations.
The Core Process
When you scan an image into a computer, the result is a picture. Human eyes and brains might be able to tell that a specific picture is a document rather than, say, a painting, but a computer doesn't know the difference right away. To a computer, text comes in the form of a language like ASCII or Unicode images are just pixels.
One core component of any document management software is the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software (or, lately, its genius cousin, Intelligent Character Recognition, ICR). As the image files are processed through the OCR module, the system processes the specific text on a given image and sorts it according to the words it finds. It then tags the images based on how it has determined the image should be sorted.
The Benefits of Electronic Content
Electronic content can be retrieved in seconds from anywhere in the world with a few keystrokes, saving, at the very least, a few minutes of going to wherever the filing cabinet is, thumbing through the file folders, thumbing through the documents within the file folder, taking the one you need back to your desk, processing it, and then putting it back when you're done.
Given the relative difficulty of retrieving a paper document, how likely is it that an employee will make a critical decision based on his or her memory of a document or just a hunch rather than go and reference the document directly? Particularly if the employee isn't in the same building as the document and would have to interrupt someone else's workday to have them fax the document over, it's actually more likely than many managers would care to admit.
Then you have the simultaneous and intuitively contrary benefits of improved security and improved accessibility. With electronic content accessible from any computer with an Internet connection, it seems like security might be an issue, but with permissions able to be granted at the file, subfolder, folder, storage-drive, and server levels, it's easy to make sure that only the relevant employees can get their hands on a file, something that's a significant challenge with a paper filing system.
With the many advantages and very few drawbacks to switching entirely over to an image-based system using modern document management software, it's no surprise that almost every modern enterprise, from governments to corporations, is going paperless. That's why 'imaging', these days, means scanning, and scanning means electronic document management: there's just no better game in town.
About the Author
About Ademero Ademero develops document imaging software and provides related professional services designed to automate business processes and simplify office workflow.Content Central, is a browser-based Document Management Software created to provide organizations with a convenient way to capture, retrieve, and manage information originating in hard copy or digital form. For more information on Ademero, visit www.ademero.com.
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