AIIM (www.aiim.org) is the community that provides education, research, and best practices to help organizations find, control and optimize their information. For more than 60 years, AIIM has been the leading non-profit organization focused on helping users understand the challenges associated with managing documents, content, records and business processes.
This survey was taken by 882 individual members of the AIIM community between November 3rd and November 17th, 2009, using a Web-based tool. Invitations to take the survey were sent via e-mail to a selection of the 65,000 AIIM community members. information and records management professionals, IT staff and line of business executives. Here is a summery of some interesting findings from this survey.
- Centralized in-house scanning and mailroom scanning are set for a considerable growth in take up compared to outsourced scanning and capture.
- Distributed scanning on MFPs is set for some growth compared to desktop scanning.
- Also set for a considerable increase is automated recognition via OCR, ICR, etc and automated classification.
- Despite the long term preferred strategies, sales next year of dedicated scanning hardware is set to drop, with MFPs just holding their own. Capture software and modules are the only areas of spend set to rise.
- Knowledge management in the form of improved searchability of business documents is the highest driver for scanning, closely followed by compliance and business process improvement.
- 46% of users report ROIs within 12 months, with two-thirds seeing returns within 18 months. These are consistent across many types of content and process, with invoices, contracts and application forms being the most popular.
- Legal admissibility of scanned documents is still seen as an issue in over a quarter of businesses.
- 30% of the sample use outsourced services, citing “No staff management overheads” as the main benefit, along with cost per scan.
- Integrating the scanned files back into the internal system is a bigger outsourcing issue than security breaches or lost documents. Quality of indexing is an issue for 30%.
- 48% of respondents have a centralized, in-house scanning service, citing better indexing and closer integration with the process as the main benefits.
- Meeting demands for fast turnaround is given as the biggest issue with central scanning operations, followed by logistics and space problems.
- 78% of those surveyed have some form of distributed scanning via MFPs, desk top scanners or branch-office scanners. Ownership of the process by the line of business owners is given as the main advantage, as well as improved utilization of MFPs.
- The biggest drawback of distributed scanning is training staff to index properly and maintaining quality of indexing over time.
- Whilst 32% of organizations report that the consumption of paper and/or number of photocopies is still increasing, this is equally balanced by those who feel it is decreasing.
- 25% of scanned documents are photocopied prior to scanning. Only 31% of scanned documents are destroyed after scanning, with a further 32% being archived off-site.
- Only 38% of paper-originated records are scanned and archived electronically.
- 51% of scanned documents are 100% “born digital”, i.e., come direct from a printer.
- 37% of organizations are scanning over half of their incoming documents. 12% scan more than 80%.
- As regards accurate recognition and capture, on average 6.5% of scanned documents are rejected at QA or require intervention.
