Spotlight: Bridging the Paper-to-Digital Divide

Transcription

1 Spotlight: Bridging the Paper-to-Digital Divide An exclusive interview with Gartner analyst Toby Bell, with an introduction from Adobe president and chief operating officer, Shantanu Narayen Shantanu Narayen President and Chief Operating Officer, Adobe Systems As president and chief operating officer, Shantanu Narayen is responsible for the day-to-day operations of Adobe s global business. Narayen s leadership of Adobe s engineering, product marketing, and sales organizations has helped make Adobe the world s leading provider of software solutions to create, manage, and deliver high-impact, reliable digital content. Automating Form-Based Business Processes Welcome to Share the Intelligence, a series of online, quarterly analyst insights about the digital automation of business processes. Each edition will examine important issues enterprises face today and offer potential solutions to ease the transition from paper-based to electronic-based processes. Like most enterprises, financial services companies are under increasing pressure to reduce operating expenses while finding new and innovative ways to retain valuable customers and acquire new ones. Similarly, government agencies need to cut costs, while improving constituent services. Both commercial and government entities face significant challenges involving processing large amounts of paper. In the U.S. alone, Pacific Crest Securities and Harvey Spencer Associates estimate manual processing costs businesses approximately $15 billion annually, representing a significant opportunity for saving costs, improving efficiency, minimizing errors, and reducing fraud. How can your enterprise take advantage of electronic processes to reap these benefits, particularly if paper is ISSUE 2 IN THIS ISSUE Spotlight: Bridging the Paper-to-Digital Divide Exclusive Interview with Gartner Analyst, Toby Bell In Closing Resources: Adobe LiveCycle and Adobe Document Services products/server/main.html Adobe LiveCycle Barcoded Forms Technology Seven points to make barcodes work for you article_new.asp?id=

2 Share the Intelligence still required for historical or regulatory reasons? Adobe is a leader in delivering solutions to create, manage, and deliver high-impact, reliable digital content. Adobe solutions help enterprises and government agencies automate the capture of data from fill-and-print paper forms and efficiently integrate captured information into core IT systems. Adobe offers the only unified system for enterprises to intelligently retrieve information from customers, constituents, employees, or trading partners, whether they submit information electronically, by fax or by mail. Using Adobe s integrated solution, enterprises can quickly automate forms-driven business processes, such as mortgage applications, new account enrollments, tax forms, and benefits administration. Today s spotlight interview on Bridging the Paper-to-Digital Divide features commentary from Gartner Research director, Toby Bell, an expert in a range of document and content management technologies for the High Performance Workplace group. We hope this information proves useful in determining how your enterprise can take advantage of today s solutions to improve your paper-based and electronic-based processes. We encourage you to use the navigation links to continue your research. Thank you for your interest in Adobe s process management solutions an important document service built on the Adobe Intelligent Document Platform. Source: Adobe 2

3 EXCLUSIVE GARTNER INTERVIEW Exclusive interview with Gartner Analyst Toby Bell What are common challenges organizations face in capturing information from customers, constituents, partners, vendors, and employees? Broadly speaking, an organization s customers and constituents are increasingly willing to submit information through electronic processes. Many people are feeling less bound to paper-based processes, so organizations should investigate ways they can utilize electronic workflows to reduce the time and complexity associated with forms-based transaction. In many cases, even today, a customer will initiate a forms-based process online, only to receive a paper copy of a form that needs to be completed by hand. Think of the costs involved with this type of process: form design, production and printing, postal delivery, and time of transit. The customer fills out the paper form and submits it, which leads to more costs. Pre-paid postage, handling, and manual processing often can introduce bad data and errors into your system leading to further problems down the road in terms of serving the customer or constituent effectively. The problem is that implementing an electronic information capture or forms system isn t necessarily easy. There are a variety of challenges organizations need to consider to create a successful electronic capture solution, such as support for various end-user platforms and submission methods, integrating captured data with numerous backend systems, and even utilizing previously known information about current customers at the beginning of the process to improve the end user s overall experience. In fact, this last point may be the most critical component. Commonly, repeat or existing customers are frustrated with the requirement to re-create information in blank forms from organizations they ve already done business with. Customers have to rebuild their history, and that is a big problem in terms of satisfaction and ease-of-use. For an enterprise to reveal what they already know about a customer is the most important step they can take. It not only saves the time of entering information, it readily allows the end user to provide better information in the event that there is an error. Moreover, there is a comfort and convenience factor consumers familiar with online applications often complain that their own bank, utility company, or favorite airline appears to know nothing about them, even though they are purchasing goods and services from these companies on a regular basis. These businesses make their customers repeatedly introduce themselves each time they fill out a new form. By setting up effective authorization policies, an automated process can pre-populate the form fields. If the information is out of date or wrong, the consumer can update it, thereby scrubbing the data for the enterprise. The key here is that the customer is spending his or her time to fix data that is critical to the organization not vice versa. Using the customer in this way is a cheaper and more effective means of capturing Toby Bell is a director in Gartner Research, responsible for a range of document and content management technologies for the High Performance Workplace group. Some key areas of coverage include vendors and trends in the enterprise content management (ECM) marketplace, business process management as it applies to enterprise content (Content/Process Fusion), and content strategy, valuation, mining and analytics. Prior to joining Gartner, Mr. Bell was a senior manager and director for a leading global consulting firm. He was responsible for identifying business problems and related emerging technology solutions that resulted in the highest immediate cost recovery for clients, coordinating and communicating global research and testing efforts related to advanced and emerging technologies, and setting direction for the firm s technology architecture. He also led a team of rapid application developers in designing the firm s document management, knowledge and collaboration, marketing information and back-office systems. Mr. Bell has held key management positions in large and small business advisory services organizations focused primarily on business intelligence, competitive intelligence, marketing technology and process improvement consulting. 3

4 Share the Intelligence and cleansing data than trying to do it in a processing center after the information has been submitted. Also, the ability to add business logic to electronic forms for data formatting and completeness, and embedded help to minimize support, can yield much better data and improve overall customer satisfaction. In addition, mid-term steps such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) each provide the means of processing printed forms and making the extracted data available to electronic systems. They tend to be more time efficient than manual rekeying, but organizations still face the challenge of low confidence words or false positives, where the OCR or ICR technology isn t sure that it has correctly interpreted the characters or incorrectly recognizes data. So a certain amount of manual quality checking is still required, even though the goal is efficiency in electronic processing. If all these problems are involved in just a single application process, one can imagine the difficulty encountered when multiple application databases are involved in updating a plethora of information. Hence, moving information into back-end application databases, especially in multiples, has become a significant problem for enterprises. It would be much easier if there were an application to move and manage data as Extensible Markup Language (XML), one database to the next, and update them all with as much data normalcy as possible. What type of benefits can organizations expect to realize by moving to full electronic forms processes? This topic comes up a great deal, and it would be nice if we had more case studies, benchmarks, ROI proof points, or global best practices for electronic forms-based processes. Within government, for example, there is escalating movement toward constituency self-service for license applications and tax filing. Any of the government forms that require information, such as a fishing license or auto title registration renewal, are candidates for electronic processing. There can be tremendous gains in efficiency with less cost and error. There are less people involved in the process, less handling of the hard copy document, less risk of lost documentation, and a much better way of providing storage security and compliance archiving. We hear from Gartner clients that once they start processing single e-forms end-to-end, they begin to reap numerous benefits. After designing the first e-form and making it available to their constituents and stakeholders, it generates demand for other e-forms very quickly. After fully electronic processes are implemented, form end-users quickly realize paper forms are inefficient and backward. It takes some initial, measurable success to engender more confidence in moving toward an electronic environment. One can see the tipping point where any enterprise begins to recognize the disadvantage and high cost of printing, designing, storing, and delivering paper forms. Enterprises should start to take into account that increasing numbers of people are willing to do transactions online. 4

5 EXCLUSIVE GARTNER INTERVIEW Financial services, such as mortgage lending, credit applications, or life insurance underwriting, are excellent candidates for e-forms adoption. In each case, there are several opportunities to cut costs, reduce the cycle time, and further increase the efficiency of process. The result can be tremendous ROI benefits and an overall increase in the amount of information moving around as XML, perhaps even lessening the amount of redundant or inconsistent application data from system-to-system. It optimizes the whole process because the number of errors decreases while the amount of throughput cycle-by-cycle and more broadly can dramatically increase. I look at many opportunities in many verticals. In government, capital asset budget approval, e-grants, and case/audit management automation are huge opportunities. In healthcare, new patient admissions, emergency room patient management, and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance are targets for improvement. There are also several horizontal processes such as employee evaluations, budget approvals, and time and expense reporting, where great gains can be made by eliminating much of the cost of design, delivery of paper, and storage along with redundant applications development. Why haven t more organizations been able to take advantage of electronic processes? What are common obstacles? The first obstacle is customers themselves. For example, when asked how they would like to receive their bank credit card statements online, through the post, or both customers often say, both. The same is true in transition from paper to electronic submission. A percentage of consumers are not yet ready to submit a form online. They may not feel comfortable with a new process that seems totally electronic; the trick is getting them started. In general, once form end users begin to use e-forms and experience the benefits, they are converted. Online travel planning and ticketing is a good example. Think about all the people who now make travel arrangements online, without dealing directly with the travel agency. There are several electronic forms involved, but all of them work sufficiently well, so consumers are happy. The same thing is true in consumer retail when people order clothing or books online. Comfort breeds further comfort. So the first time a bank customer is willing to submit an online credit application that works well, he is then going to be comfortable filling out an online mortgage application. If the process works faster and better, customers understand what the organizations they do business with know about them, and they get a better end-user experience. The bottom line is we first have to educate consumers that electronic communication is a good way for them to achieve and receive what they want from the businesses serving them. Secondly, businesses need to carefully consider whether or not an ink signature is truly required, because digital signatures are sufficient proof for many transactions. Businesses do not yet understand this. Ultimately, the need for an ink signature may become less frequent, and digital signatures will suffice in more cases than businesses realize. My recommendation to 5

6 Share the Intelligence enterprises is to look into digital signature opportunities and determine whether there are any regulatory or compliance issues where ink is truly required. Once this is done, managing the number of processes that are presently defined as requiring wet signatures can be reduced. I believe that over time we will have several means of authentication, and we will not require nearly as much blue ink as we presently do. Now, think about the complexities in a mortgage application, where forms require two signatures plus initials, and a series of legal or accountant reviews. There are still many forms-based processes where a conversion from paper to electronic forms is simply going to be too difficult. In some cases, paper is going to remain for many processes for years to come. If enterprises think about how to modify a process with a paperless goal in mind, they may be able to achieve a much greater measure of success, but it won t necessarily be a complete and total success. They will move a little bit at a time one form, one piece, one part even as they plan holistically and strategically about moving toward a near-paperless environment. Another obstacle continues to be the difficulty of integrating all the backend application databases and making sure that whatever they are using on the front-end actually coordinates with those back-ends. It often entails high costs and a high degree of difficulty. However, I also believe that Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs), standards in terms of process management and integration, and provisioning structured and unstructured data effectively as XML, will allow the technology to plug-and-play well together, and forms will move XML in and out very effectively. The result will be much more throughput and much less concern about proprietary coding and application programming interfaces (APIs). Ultimately paper will go away, and we ll see organizations transition to more and more electronic forms processes. But paper isn t going to disappear right away. And for many processes, paper form submissions, even if the form is filled electronically, will be the most effective medium. If paper-based forms are mandatory for a process, how can organizations improve their processing efficiency? Part of it is the understanding of which processes, or parts of a process, should remain as paper and which can become electronic. There are also ways of marrying paper and electronic processes. One interesting way of doing that is with a dynamic 2D barcode. As someone fills out a form, either online or offline, the barcode changes or updates to include the user s information. In effect, the barcode is encoding the user-supplied information in real time. Once the form is completed, it can be printed for signature and submitted as paper. Since the data has been encoded in the 2D barcode, the form can be processed in an automated fashion with very high accuracy. And it has an ink signature. Using 2D barcodes blends aspects of the electronic forms process-the form is filled electronically and the information is encoded with 100% accuracy and can be captured in an automated fashion-and a paper process-the form arrives on paper with an ink signature or signatures that meet regulatory or legal requirements for certain business workflows. So data entry does not mean re-reading the whole form either manually or in OCR; instead the processing organization 6

7 EXCLUSIVE GARTNER INTERVIEW automatically and accurately captures the information directly from the barcodes. Another way of marrying paper and electronic-based processes includes digital signatures and common currency like PDF. Since there is a ubiquitous reader supported on every platform, PDF document sharing is considered common currency on the Internet. Accordingly, enterprises can use PDF, 2D barcodes, digital signatures, and digital rights management in conjunction with one another. Organizations can actually use barcoded PDF forms that can be filled in a free PDF reader and submitted either electronically or by fax or paper. There s ways to combine the best components of paper processes with the best parts of electronic processes to help organizations achieve improved efficiencies, while gradually moving towards their goal of fully electronic processes. What s nice is they don t have to rip out existing processes. They can automate processes in place as they transition to fully electronic systems. There is a great deal of creation and consumption balancing yet to be done. Most enterprises are not fully oriented toward electronic forms and realize that they are still going to have to re-key some information. For other information they may be able to use OCR, and for some information they may be able to immediately move to electronic forms. Hence, I think there is less emphasis on strategy, cost management, process efficiency, and enduser satisfaction than there probably should be, given the overall opportunity value of electronic forms. An initial analysis is a very good idea. The first thing an enterprise wants to do is figure out how much information still needs to be re-keyed. Many people are filling out forms by hand, and it will be difficult to read those with an OCR or ICR engine as the form is not optimized to be all-caps, in boxes, etc. So an enterprise project team needs to ask: What will actually still have to be re-keyed? What can I pick off with 2D barcodes, OCR or ICR (at a high enough rate to gain cost advantage)? Most importantly, how can I migrate, over time, more and more completion of the form to a fully online version, and thus gain all the possible benefits and advantages of that model? Are there technologies that can ease the transition from paper-based to electronic-based processes? Traditionally, many organizations have relied on OCR to help ease the transition between paper-based and electronic-based processes. But there are significant challenges with OCR as a means of efficiently converting paper-based data into digital or electronic data. When a paper document is scanned and converted to digital using a character recognition process, like OCR, you get false positives that is, characters are sometimes misinterpreted, and other times the conversion software simply isn t confident enough in its interpretation and wants a human to check to make sure it s correct. The human component of checking and correcting adds to 7

8 Share the Intelligence the cost of electronically processing paper documents, sometimes dramatically, depending on how good the OCR system is and how well the system is tuned to a specific type of form or document. Until recently, there haven t been many effective alternatives to scanning paper, interpreting characters with OCR, and performing manual quality assurance. However, barcoded forms, or interactive forms that contain a two-dimensional barcode, represent a significant advancement in automating the capture of data from one specific type of paper forms, filland-print paper forms, and converting that data efficiently and accurately to electronic systems. Without manual intervention, the biggest benefit of barcoded forms is that the user-supplied data is captured dynamically in a machine readable symbol that is printed on the page. This symbol is the two-dimensional barcode. And unlike OCR, where, as I mentioned, you need human involvement to ensure accurate conversion, the capture of data from a 2D barcode is 100% accurate from what the user entered into the form. As long as your barcode decoder can read the barcode, or decode the symbol, which it should do in almost every case, a barcoded forms system will capture the paper-based data accurately. It s a one or zero. It captures all of the data or it captures none of it. Unlike OCR, there is no in between. What this means is that you don t need human intervention to interpret the data from fill-and-print paper forms. You let the software do it. And it s 100% accurate. If the system can t read a barcode, because it s damaged or torn, then the form goes into the exception process, and you simply manually key it. In comparison to OCR, you have more efficient data capture, in terms of data accuracy, speed and cost of entry. Barcoded forms can be especially relevant for processes where an organization wants to post a form electronically on its web site. Think of any type of self-service customer or citizen application that can be published on your site, but is returned by paper or fax because it needs an ink signature, additional paper attachments, multiple signatures, or some customers simply prefer the paper process. Think about tax forms. Brokerage account applications. Government forms. These are all excellent examples of how barcoded forms are being used today. An enterprise wants everything they do to move toward greater efficiency, and the way to do that tends to be through electronic processes. That is why I like the 2D barcode idea. And you can combine this new technology with some of the significant improvements being made in OCR and ICR to effectively bridge the gap between old paper-based, forms-based processes and new electronic forms-faced, collaborate processes. Use the 2D barcode for your interactive form component and use OCR for the attachments or ICR for handwritten comments. There s much more benefit accrued from progressing incrementally. Changes can be made toward further transformation (pun intended) transition little by little, while managing out inefficiency, cost, error, time, and perhaps even fraud. 8

9 EXCLUSIVE GARTNER INTERVIEW Any enterprise considering these types of conversion techniques wants to first ask, How can I get cost recovery in the near term for my implementation? How can I start to generate some ROI from this? There are many ways, but I think it can be proven pretty early that with OCR/ICR and 2D barcodes, one can bridge the electronic divide fairly effectively. In this way, one is always optimizing a little bit at a time, electronically gathering as much information as possible from those forms. It is good for enterprises that are already managing a glut of paper to start working slowly toward something that is better. The key is not to disrupt what they are already doing. Do not take anything out that is already in play without a plan. Instead, add in a relatively inexpensive approach to migrating toward a better process. That way, you don t have to change the back-end applications, or change how your end users interact with your forms. With the forward and backward compatibility handled, as with 2D barcodes, you can transition relatively easily from paper to electronic forms without having to create the whole inventory of printed forms. They can be printed on demand, by the end user, and as they are changed or modified, new versions can be published immediately for use by the customers or citizen. Enterprises may choose to do what they have always done, but can now opt to use lower cost, electronic alternatives with greater efficiency. That is a big factor. Therefore, if an enterprise has a strong requirement for forms, and they are looking for a way to transition slowly, without disruption or changes to their architecture, they should probably look at this 2D barcoded approach. It seems pretty simple, but I believe the real point now is to educate the marketplace that this kind of technology is available. It is vital to communicate some of the benefits, proof points, and stories of those who are reaping the initial advantage of having made this transition. Source: Gartner 9

10 Share the Intelligence In Closing With the right technologies, enterprises and government organizations can bridge the paper-to-digital divide, as well as significantly reduce manual processing costs, improve efficiency, minimize errors, and reduce fraud. Adobe s process management solutions help organizations achieve the benefits of electronic, automated forms processing, while managing the need to retain paper for historical reasons, to meet customer requirements, or to comply with regulations. Using Adobe solutions, organizations can extend core business processes more securely. By deploying XML-based form templates as Adobe PDF or HTML over any platform or device, enterprises can also capture data from both electronic and paper-based resubmitted forms and transfer it directly into core systems. As a result, enterprises can streamline forms-driven business processes and improve data accuracy. We hope you enjoyed this edition of Share the Intelligence. We look forward to sharing future publications throughout the year. If you have suggestions or comments about Share the Intelligence, please send them via to sharetheintelligence@adobe.com. For more information about Adobe s process management solutions, please visit Thank you. Share the Intelligence is published by Adobe Systems Incorporated. Editorial supplied by Adobe Systems Incorporated is independent of Gartner analysis. All Gartner research is 2005 by Gartner, Inc and/or its Affiliate. All rights reserved. All Gartner materials are used with Gartner s permission. The use or publication of Gartner research does not indicate Gartner s endorsement of Adobe s products and/or strategies. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. 2005, Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved. Adobe and the Adobe logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe systems Incorporated in the United States and other countries. CC