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IW's Bruce Taylor has had a richly varied
publishing career, starting with journalism posts in Europe (Reuters &
the Herald Tribune), a stint as a researcher for 60 Minutes, and as editor
of a travel magazine which sent him on a walking tour of Romania, Estonia
and Bulgaria in the days long before Perestroika (when "the color of
my necktie" caused near-riots in small mountain villages). He recognized
computers as a fertile publishing field and grew his stake into Cardinal
Media Publications, based in Camden, Maine. Among the company's titles are
IW, Enterprise Systems Journal, Digital Age, Unisphere, and Enterprise Windows
NT. Recently in Reston, he was joined for dinner by SIGCAT's President Jerry
McFaul and Marketing Director Sean Harris. What follows is part of their
conversation; the rest is available by e-mail.
Taylor: We are a document culture. As a species, the only way we have progressed, or regressed, or moved left or right, has been through documentation. And that documentation goes back to the earliest river wall etchings or cave drawings. The greatest orator could not have moved man to do anything unless his words could be recorded or disseminated in the form of a document. The transistor helped us to process information, code it, store it, bind it and circulate it, but all (the information) was based on data which dates from the beginning of computers. Out of all of the data captured by computer technology, very little of it goes back beyond that beginning. We haven't really gone back into history to capture data yet. We never went back to capture the great libraries of the world, and convert them to this new coded data medium. Why? Because it was tedious and expensive and it wasn't part of the driving need of the moment. And the driving need of the moment is always, "Get the job done." We've got financial institutions to run, insurance institutions to run, governments to run, with ever-increasing amounts of data, and the whole effort in data mining today is to go back and capture some of that history into coded data and analyze it. In the coded world, the far past history of humanity doesn't exist, in a larger sense. That history is on microforms of one kind or another, or on paper, the most stable medium of all time.
Harris: Humanity is also on paintings and artwork, but it is not digital.
Taylor: Right, and by not being digital, you are prevented from informing today and tomorrow with yesterday. You are also prevented from using broad- or narrow-searching manipulation of digital information to find that needle in the haystack you need to get the kind of insight not available to a human being who is simply reading the paper document. Getting that history into digital form is crucial, and it is just now being done through data mining.
McFaul: So explain data mining in three sentences.
Taylor: It occurs when the decision is made that we are sitting on huge amounts of data which, if analyzed correctly, can yield insightful information. If you could go back to the beginning of computer history and understand, for example, the Social Security Administration and its aging demographics of the country's population going back 50 years, you could process and then forecast. Data mining is about going back into history to make new databases to use in forecasts or predicting trends.
McFaul: When did data mining start?
Taylor: It's already started. You didn't have the neural agents five years ago to begin the process. The software, the tools, there were no search engines. For instance, let's say I wanted to know all the information available about breast cancer in women between the ages of 13 and 39 at a certain period of our history. I need to mine that data from every resource available. I now have the software search engines to make comprehensive searches that penetrate the strata of data right to the granular level.
McFaul: The technological reason that couldn't happen in the past was that the vast amounts of data you would be looking through were on sequentially-accessed media and not easily accessible. The very fact that we have now moved into basically a randomly-accessed memory storage society offers the ability to find things within a reasonable amount of time. And it allows for indexing! Harris: So where is the frontier in this? Taylor: Step back for a second. What document management is about if you take it at its highest and best application, is the ability to go into the past and capture images to inform the future. As Bill Gates has done with the great artworks of history. You preserve the original and therefore have the ability to inform today and tomorrow with that information. You've kept image fidelity. You can use the image in ways you've never thought of before. You can put whatever you capture into whatever structure you want _ that is document management. Capturing, processing, storing, fidelity, full text retrieval _
McFaul: And maybe even enhancing as you go along.
Taylor: Yes, but let's look at the process from the lowest value per item to highest value in terms of business production. Check processing, credit card remittance slip processing, airline ticket processing; high volume, sounds relatively simple, but it is not. It is not only about capturing the image by scanning at high speed, but also in most cases about cleaning and de-skewing and doing all kinds of sophisticated software procedures. And then add in color. With airline tickets, each color serves a different purpose. Hundreds of millions of documents per day are being accurately captured, which was never possible until now.
Harris: The BLER readers want to know one thing, Bruce: Where is it all going? Taylor: In today's workflow, a piece of paper faxed into a corporation is likely to be nothing but bits from then on. It is now on an optical disc sitting on a jukebox. Each person gets each piece of information when they should get it and they get just the information they are authorized to work on. And what that does is profound. It makes insurance claims, for instance, go from processing times of many days or weeks or even months to resolutions which can take only minutes to accomplish. Think about this: Through electronic commerce, you can have a settlement to a customer's complaint into the customer's bank account the same day. The customer satisfaction that goes with that may be hard to measure, but it is considerable. And think of the time and effort saved on everybody's part. Imagine if you guys had had a fender-bender on the way over to the hotel for dinner tonight. Imagine if, by tomorrow afternoon, you had $800 wired into your bank account from your insurance company. Let's say you originally thought the fender-bender was worth $1,000, but you could have $800 immediately the next day. You'd probably settle for the $800.
McFaul: And not only that but you're going to tell your friends, "Check out what happened with my insurance company." And your friends are going to ask, "Who is your insurance company"?
Harris: How aware do you think the average business person is about these technological possibilities? Forget the IW subscriber for a moment. What about the business folks?
Taylor: People see the evidence of the technology every day, but perhaps their awareness of its existence is low _
McFaul: It's like a new car with 18 computers: you only have to tune it up every 100,000 miles and it runs great but you're not going to do a lot of tinkering under the hood. I'm in the field of technology myself and I've given up any hope of ever being able to tune up my car again.
Taylor: Does the average bank cashier, or even the average bank manager, know that the daily transactions are going to a computer output to a laser disc rather than to microfilm? On the information services side, people are pretty aware. Document management is one of those applied information technologies where the request to have a problem solved comes from management. Chances are if you are a claims adjuster at an insurance company, you know your company has some kind of corporate IS, but that doesn't mean corporate IS will buy into the technology. We're only now getting over the problems of the first stand-alone systems which have become fully integrated. And IS managers have enough on their platters. The CIO is already beleaguered enough without having to worry about new technologies. He is under-budgeted and has a hard enough time supporting his existing client-server architecture. Where he was previously required to write 50,000 lines of code annually out of his department, he now has to come up with double that figure; they cut his staff by 10 people, etc. It's a funny thing about coded data; because it makes you more efficient, you end up attempting to do more, so the bottom line often doesn't reflect actual cost savings from document management technologies.
McFaul: Give us your take on reengineering as the term is used in the field.
Taylor: Reengineering is a business term representing the conspiracy of several advanced technologies. If you didn't have inter- and intra-network capability, if you didn't have client- server capability and particularly if you didn't have document management capability, you couldn't redesign a function such as word processing. Most word processors are based on paper documents; if you cannot change the way paper documents are managed, you cannot reengineer a business process. Pure and simple. The primary processing of information is now electronic. It's only put to paper because today the distribution of information is still predominantly paper.
Harris: Look at that business community again: How well-equipped is the U.S. business community with the various technologies available? If every single company was using every technology available, and that was judged to be 100% efficient, how would you grade the community? I want to understand the penetration of the technology, and do companies not using the newest document management technologies really fall behind the companies which do?
Taylor: This is interesting to think about: There is no correlation, statistically provable, that can show that those businesses that have adopted these technologies and have proven their value from a competitive standpoint (are causing) other companies to adopt the technology. And some of these companies which have embraced the technologies are on their second or third generations of equipment! Consider the insurance industry: There is a leadership group of companies that are way out in front. The rest are following behind. They won't stay competitive. They don't see that they are missing the competitive edge. That's what my job is . . . to help them understand what the competitive issues are. Where are we today in terms of business penetration? We are at 25% (of what is possible) .
Harris: And where were we two years ago? Where are we going to be two years from now?
Taylor: Two years ago we were at 20%. I don't think it's growing any faster than that.
Harris: Actually, that's pretty strong growth, if the penetration has gone from 20% to 25% in two years. That represents a growth of 25% in two years _
Taylor: The growth of the document management industry is somewhere around 20%, but other parts of it are growing at 150%. That's the software side. The image processing side is growing slowest. The full market is growing at 20%. The major components of the market are of course large systems. The large systems and the high-end scanners and subsystems are growing the slowest. Part of that is because of fewer corporate targets. Many people are depending on upgrade sales. The cost of the technology has gone down so dramatically. The cost of the average production installation just four years ago was $750,000. My guess is now the cost is under $500,000. My first laser printer, a $30,000 dollar machine, could produce one black and white 200 dpi page every few minutes. Five years later, the machine was cost $3,000 and could produce 10 pages per minute. Five years later it was $5,000. It is now under $500 dollars. I just purchased a 1200 dpi full-color laser printer that is around $3,000! But software is what drives the market. That's really where the excitement is. It's intranets. It's what you can do in engineering document management, product data management using intranets.
McFaul: What's your view on virtual reality and game-playing interactive technologies?
Taylor: The last issue of Business Week really got me thinking, because it really pointed out another element of convergence which the SIGCAT '97 Conference might want to examine. One of the things that has broadened the use of CD-based training has been the low cost of game player machines. You can use a Nintendo machine as a training device. And you can use the Internet and Web-connected CD as a wonderful simulation device. Training or simulation, it's all game playing, all interactive. The games industry drew on military experience initially, using early interactive flight and simulation techniques, and now the games industry is giving back; serious applications are using the developments provided by the games developers. It's come full circle. They are giving back their programming techniques or 3D or visualization, simulation, VR _ and not just to government but also to industry. The article goes right to the heart of the new commercial uses for gaming technology. There is also some talk about the issue of interactive games for children. What is the cultural impact of DOOM? Very intriguing.
Harris: How do you feel about the business community becoming so much more efficient with information? What is the impact on society of computers which can instantly track every single unpaid bill, or political action of your past?
Taylor: I am not worried about Big Brother. The biggest issue is not who knows about you or me. The biggest issue is how can we get a hold of that information to enrich our lives or our communities. Security is not as much a concern to me compared with the possibilities of people making use of information. Our little conference in Camden next October examines in detail what it means for a town to be wired. What does it really mean to American communities? Particularly the rural and ex-urban ones, where there have been enormous investments made in the telecommunications infrastructure, such as Telluride (Colorado) or Blacksburg (West Virginia) or even Camden. The title of our conference is "Camden Conference of Telecommunications: Reshaping the American Community."
Harris: As an editor and a writer, and as someone who lives in Maine and who has a fairly organic approach to life, how do you feel about the rampant growth of technology?
Taylor: Information technology will transform humankind more than anything in history. Even more than fire. Technology allows me to live the way I want to live and to have the lifestyle I want to have. I live in Maine, on the ocean. I can row to work if I want to. I am part of an intellectually challenging community of friends of all stripes. I feel no deprivation. And I don't feel forced to live in the city. Technology has allowed for the ex-urbanization of this country and the world. It is not without its failings, to be sure. I think the more pertinent issue is that culturally we haven't been able to keep up with the technology. It took a long time for society to accept cars. There are still lots of people who don't like cars!
Harris: Let's talk about document management outside the U.S. and Europe. What is the situation in Third World countries?
Taylor: Particularly in the Equatorial Third World there is a need to preserve documents because of threats posed by environmental concerns. CD and other technologies are used to preserve culture and history before the paper literally wastes away. Also, digital communications and CD-ROMs are the most effective ways of disseminating information in the poorer countries. For instance, if you can't get health data onto a CD-ROM you might not be able to get that data into many African countries, because some of those countries have no infrastructure for delivering data of any value. The PC and its CD drive are pretty important to a lot of rural health clinics.
McFaul: How international is your own organization, Cardinal Business Media?
Taylor: We're in Asia and Europe. But in Europe the market is so fractured, that there really is no such thing as a European market. One of the inhibiting factors to document management in Europe, interestingly, is the continent's social contracts system of labor reduction. Whenever you threaten to reduce the job force, even if through technology, you meet up with resistance from both corporations and governments. Wherever the labor rates for key entry are low enough, you have got competition to the technology. Data entry wins out. There are a lot of American companies which send data entry jobs offshore to places like Ireland, India or the Philippines, wherever the labor rates are the lowest. Extremely low wage rates actually impede the adoption of technology. Something that costs $10 a page in this country might cost 80 cents per page somewhere else.
Harris: Give us a glimpse of what is happening on the state and county government levels.
Taylor: The technology is affordable and the local governments have to use it. If you go out into the hinterlands of our country and see where the seats of the county are housed, you'll find they're mostly in small brick buildings with limited space, and those officials are sitting on maps and titles and other disintegrating documents which are just crying out to be digitized. |
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