It's Information that Generates New Ideas and Drives Decisions for SMB... Small to Mid-size Businesses... and XEROX

"According to IDC Research Firm, offices around the world will produce 4.5 trillion pages of hard copy information by 2007." Introduction to Smarter Document Management
1 “The Role of Documents in Effective Business Processes,” Angele Boyd, IDC, October 2004.

Every organization – small start ups, growing mid-size and global corporations — has made an investment in Information Technology. From 1997 to 2003, U.S. companies spent $2.5 trillion on IT, according to the research firm IDC. IDC research house goes further to state that by 2007, offices around the world will produce 4.5 trillion pages of hard copy information.

The emphasis for businesses as they try to reduce costs and improve productivity is not to eliminate paper, but to streamline how the information embedded in the paper documents is handled.

Many organizations are looking beyond adding technology in order to improve the bottom line; they are looking to the people and processes actively shaping their workplace. They are interested in growing smarter, not bigger.

With the shift in focus, new questions are raised; how can they tailor and manage the technology to best meet their needs, and how can they later alter their processes to best use the technology? When it comes to investing in IT, there is a marked shift from the “T” to the “I” — from the technology to the information. It’s information that generates new ideas and drives decisions (Boyd; 2004).

The Big “I” and Document Challenge

Documents are one of the most critical elements of working life, the key connectors between IT infrastructure, people, and critical business processes. A recent report from IDC characterizes the growing importance of documents as “driven by regulatory compliance, the need to communicate with customers, suppliers and employees across multiple media, and the role of documents in effective business process solutions and related investments”(Boyd; 2004).

The costs that lie in the production, distribution and use of documents are a hidden, overlooked and generally misunderstood aspect of business cost and productivity. In all cases, the documents carry content that constitutes the backbone of work processes. However, that content is still mostly unstructured and hidden within the verbal expressions of text. It is up to individual users to figure out where to take it, what to do with it, how to process it and take an action on it (Boyd; 2004).

Copyright © 2005 Xerox Corporation. Xerox®, Smarter Document Management smb and DocuShare® are trademarks of Xerox Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.
Microsoft® is a trademark of Microsoft, Inc.