I was just going through the latest edition of the Document Imaging Report (3-7-2014) and as usual, there were a lot of through-provoking articles. The most interesting one, from the perspective of the future of the capture industry, discussed one particular vendor’s approach to enabling common capabilities of capture software into any business application through provisioning of web services.

It’s well-known that there are far more companies that could use capabilities of document capture software such as classification, separation, data extraction, and conversion, but for many reasons don’t. One such reason is that it’s too complex. Another reason is that it doesn’t quite fit with current business processes. It’s just not flexible enough; especially for today’s use of business software which continues its mass transition to web-accessible, on-demand use.

We’re definitely seeing this transition and reacting by focusing on making our document capture software more document processing-centric and less about the capture of the document in the first place.

It’s high-time that the capture industry focus on delivering what businesses really need and when they need it over the antiquated approach of scan–>classify–>extract/convert–>validate–>release workflows that you see on practically every capture software vendor’s website and product presentations.

Companies have literally millions of documents already captured and stored in document management, records management, enterprise content management, line-of-business, and many other applications. What they really need isn’t a front-end document capture system. What they need is to better classify, locate, extract, describe, and protect data in documents that they already have.

The road forward is to have “plugable” document processing capability when and where businesses need it.