A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to Digitization
by Jim Lyons
I spent much of this summer
pondering the question “What’s keeping the world from being 100 percent digitized?”
I am not confident I am any closer to an answer, but I definitely have come up
with some fine points on the question. For my September Observations, I’ll
retrace at least a few of those mental steps.
Summer reading and the history of
copying
A piece of my mental jigsaw
puzzle is from a much-touted “summer read” of 2014. I refer to “Business
Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street”, by John
Brooks, acclaimed by both Bill
Gates and Warren Buffett.
I had to get my nose into this
book, which dates back to the 1960s but was out of print until this August (adding
a bit of a “forbidden fruit” allure as well). However, little did I know it
would provide a starting point for my “funny thing happened” quest.
One of those “Wall Street tales” is
entitled “Xerox Xerox Xerox.” It relates the story of the rise of XRX stock —
one of the biggest growth stocks of the 1960s and 1970s. Brooks goes back to the (really) early days of
document duplication (which eventually became known as “copying” and
“printing”) and the rise of industry pioneer, the AB Dick Company. The
following paragraph got me thinking we are on a 100-year-plus-long journey of
going full circle with business documents and their security. (“Grandfather” in
this passage is the company’s namesake, as it describes the challenge of
selling their early duplicators.)
“By and
large, the first users of the [AB Dick duplicator] were non-business
organizations like churches, schools, and Boy Scout troops. To attract companies
and professional men, Grandfather and his associates had to undertake an
enormous missionary effort. Office duplicating by machine was a new and
unsettling idea that upset long-established office patterns. In 1887, after
all, the typewriter had been on the market only a little over a decade and
wasn’t yet in widespread use, and neither was carbon paper. If a businessman or
a lawyer wanted five copies of a document, he’d have a clerk make five copies —
by hand. People would say to Grandfather, ‘Why should I want to have a lot of
copies of this and that lying around? Nothing but clutter in the office, a
temptation to prying eyes, and a waste of good paper.”
 |
| The quotation above, as it appears in the Kindle version of "Business Adventures". The ebook was available earlier in the summer, prior to the print version's release. |
Of course those attitudes and
practices would do a 180, but knowing it was over 100 years ago when paper
documents began their path to entrenchment in those “long-established business
patterns,” it makes sense that there is resistance to changing them again, in
this case to digitization. It’s just not as simple as eliminating “a waste of
good paper” and those other virtues (like security) associated with fewer paper
documents cluttering up the office.
The celebrity iCloud hack
Another recent reference has been
late summer’s well-covered “celebrity photo hack” that revealed (sorry for the
pun — should I say exposed?) security issues with cloud storage. While photos
are not business documents, the risks (and benefits) of cloud storage and
access are no different. Is this just one more knock on digitization and the
cloud, holding businesses back from a more far-reaching, universal digitizing
of their documents?
The Great Digital Divide
A friend and fellow analyst Robert Palmer offered some of his
thoughts in his recent Workflow magazine article, “The
Great Digital Divide: Working Effectively in an Electronic Office.”
In his article, Palmer offers these
cautionary thoughts:
“The rush
to digitize content has led to several obstacles now facing many organizations.
Maintaining document integrity and preventing data loss are two of the most
significant concerns when pursuing a digital document strategy. These problems
should not be underestimated, although many businesses fail to recognize the
significance of the impact — especially as it relates to lost productivity.
“One such
problem is the simple and pervasive nature of scanning. Scanning has become
quite common in today’s office environment, and it is no longer a process that
is limited to back-office applications. Employees want access to scanning, and
with the proliferation of MFPs and network-enabled scanners in the office
environment they now have it. Market research has shown that more than 70
percent of knowledge workers in the average office today have access to
scanners and scanning functionality. Interestingly, that percentage holds
fairly consistent regardless of the vertical market.”
Hiro Kataoka, industry entrepreneur
So is it “FUD” (fear, uncertainty
and doubt) that is holding back a more universal adoption of electronic
processes? It was conversations with industry expert and friend Hiro Kataoka,
the founder and CEO of digital-rights-solution provider HoGo, that actually started me on this
summer of preoccupation. Several more conversations along the way helped me
fill in some additional pieces. With long-term resistance based on favoring
paper, fears over security, and other points raised here, will digitization
ever gain universal acceptance? Kataoka not only
offers extensive experience and opinions, but has cast his lot in the digital
world by forming a company to address this problem/opportunity. Additionally,
his previous market focus was mobile printing, so I had to know, was the
digitization play removed from this interest, or did he find an integration
point in these market spaces?A complete interview with Kataoka appears in the October issue of The Imaging Channel (online at http://theimagingchannel.com/files/OCT14.pdf), but his key points are as follows:
1) Lack of security/traceability and usability are barriers to adoption of digitization
2) But, there is a new opportunity in scan to mobile
3) We [HoGo] are going the direction of Box [the cloud company] + DRM [Digital Rights Management]
4) DRM allows us to protect the content, not just the network
5) MFP's should be part of the “liquid computing” ecosystem
6) The cloud is the glue that connects scanning, printing, desktop, and mobile
And finally, back to the celebrity cloud-security snafu of August 2014 - it is covered HoGo’s recent “tongue firmly in cheek” blog post here.
Comments