Wednesday, July 23, 2008 10:23 AM
by
loufranco
CMS Watch asks: "Imaging - the most important element of ECM?"
Alan Pelz-Sharpe of CMS Watch has an interesting article about the importance of ECM Imaging:
At many conferences, and regularly via e-mail, people ask me about imaging
in the context of ECM. Imaging
is the the major cost that most projects either forget about or dramatically
under budget for. Partly this is due to the fact that during the buying process
it's all too easy to get caught up in the flurry of believing that every file
will soon be digital. Even though paper is clearly here to stay.
He goes on to point out where the costs lie:
[...] the scanner is the least of your concerns. The cost
and complexity of capture do lie not in hardware. Rather, your bigger expense
will come in the form of software -- software that processes the captured image,
indexes it, and puts it through quality controls, and (in many cases) extracts
data elements and instigates workflows.
At Atalasoft, we are big believers that you can implement the exact ECM Imaging solution you want by using toolkits, and that the overall costs will be lower if you do so. Obviously, to make that calculation, you need to know the total cost of the alternatives (licensing, customization, roll-out, user-productivity, on-going maintenance, etc.), and Alan is right that it is worth doing that calculation because the total costs and potential savings are significant.