Capture is the oldest of the enterprise content management (ECM) technologies, and I’m happy to say that it’s still running strong (as compared to, say, microfilm, which is older but not thriving these days).
The good news is that it can give great return on investment, or ROI. Capture (plus a little workflow, perhaps) can provide ROI almost by itself, and then serve as a foundation for more advanced workflow, as well as for outsourcing and other opportunities.
And there’s more good news. Because capture has been around since the 1980s, there’s great data on best and worst practices! That is, we know what kinds of capture applications are worth attempting, which technologies work (and which ones don’t work), and how you should run your capture operation. Other technologies (e.g. electronic records management, e-discovery, and social media) aren’t as mature and are an entirely different matter.
But there’s good capture, and there’s bad capture. So which capture applications are good and worth considering?
Good capture applications have the following characteristics:
- First, capture is necessary for these applications, and workflow is highly recommended for them, though you can get great benefit by starting with capture alone.
- Second, the required technologies (capture, optical character recognition or OCR, workflow, etc.) actually work really well.
- Third, the applications (e.g. Accounts Payable, loan processing) are mature, they’ve been proven in production, and it’s been shown that you can get ROI if you do them well.
- And finally, most organizations have them.
Good capture applications range from relatively simple applications, what might be called “Administrative Applications,” to the more complex “Line-of-Business Applications.” I’ll discuss examples of each in my next post.