Document Imaging: Retrieve First, Scan Last

The paperless office. Now there's a mirage. Businesses of all sizes struggle to manage the flow of paper and scanning documents for digital archiving and management puts companies in control of the information. But scanning is just the start -- what do you do with all those scanned documents?According to Kodak's Roger Markham, 80% of the unstructured data in today's business world is on paper documents. That's an enormous percentage of valuable business information to capture, but only by managing it effectively can you turn it to your advantage to help grow your business.

Rather than jumping head first into a company-wide scanning effort, the result should be the starting point according to Markham. He says, "The biggest mistake that people make when they implement document imaging solutions, is that you have to think about retrieval first."

One of the questions about retrieval is access, which can be controlled via software permissions or physically, by limiting access to the repository. Johnson Yang is the GM of NewSoft America, the company behind Presto! PageManager 8 Professional, a document management and sharing application. Yang points out that putting the access point right on the desktop allows staff across an organization to maximize the information housed in digitized documents. "Businesses generate a lot of paperwork every day," he says. "We've found that users want to manage the documents from the desktop. It puts control in their hands."

Regardless of the type of solution or the vendor, an important step in thinking about retrieval is understanding the document imaging process. For more on this visit the bMighty Imaging How-To Center where you'll find a primer on document imaging and a step-by-step workflow addressing the basic process [free registration required].