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Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 1 Table Of Contents It’s Reflection Season – And Time to Look Ahead 2 UiPath, the End of the RPA Wars, and Enterprise Automation 3 TWAIN Direct Developers Day Uncovers Lucrative Business Opportunities 5 Capture and IDP in the Middle East – An Update From the GITEX Global Event 9 The DIR Interview: Jed Cawthorne Talks ECM, Mars, and Red Knights 13 Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 2 It’s Reflection Season – And Time to Look Ahead Around when the clocks roll back (morning of November 6 for all of you US readers!), I begin to look back at the year – what should I lean into? What should I lean away from? A look a the good, the bad, and the ugly, so to speak (and also still a good movie!). It’s also always funny to be astonished at how close Christmas and the Holiday Season is once again – wasn’t it just July last week? Even more astonishing – knowing this and still being late on the shopping each year. Like many, I use the re□ection to consider what I want next year to be – personally and professionally. One thing I strongly believe is that DIR will be sure to include insight from all of Infosource’s subject matter experts. This issue has former editor Ralph Gammon providing an overview of UiPath – if you still think of them as “only” an RPA vendor, you need to think again. Petra Beck provides details on the state of the industry in the Middle East based on her recent trip to GITEX. And while I have a tendency to see the gaps and things we didn’t get a chance to cover, we’ve also provided a great deal of unique insight into the Capture space. Looking ahead, we have our predictions issue coming in December. What’s your prediction for 2023? I’d love to hear them – and share them – in that issue. Drop me a line and I’ll share details and due dates. Thanks for reading, Bryant Duhon Editor-in-Chief Comments, criticisms, and witticisms welcomed. bdu@info-source.com Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 3 The most popular application of Document Understanding has been invoice processing, but several improvements being included in the new 2022.10 release are expected to broaden this footprint. This includes doubling the number of pre-trained document processing models. UiPath currently offers pre-trained models for invoices in several countries, passports, ID cards, contracts, receipts, and tax forms. There is also new support for barcode, signature, and QR code recognition, additional languages, and improved auto-splitting of complex documents into multiple parts. From what we gathered at the event, even though Document Understanding capabilities have been rudimentary compared to more mature Capture products, end customers and integrators like that it can be deployed as part of broader automation initiative. One user we talked to explained that while he had several RPA projects going on, he only had one that required IDP. It involved about 1,000 invoices per year, and while the initial automation results weren’t great (by traditional Capture industry standards), a more recent version of the software drastically improved the straight- through processing results. As far as UiPath is concerned, the RPA wars are over. Citing an analyst □rm that credits UiPath with owning about a third of the market, UiPath has declared itself the winner and is moving on to fry bigger □sh — namely the nascent Enterprise Automation space. Financial Services giant Morgan Stanley describes Enterprise Automation as taking what was once a series of siloed technologies and enabling them to be applied more uniformly across an enterprise. Enterprise Automation is estimated to be a $40B market by 2025, which is more than double the size analysts are projecting the RPA market to reach by that time. In seven years, focusing on RPA, UiPath has managed to increase its revenue from almost nothing to its current annual run rate (ARR) of greater than $1B, so its RPA business is not going away. However, the ISV’s plan is to complement RPA sales by expanding aggressively into adjacent technologies like process mining and Capture/Intelligent Document Processing (IDP). In fact, at UiPath’s recent Forward5 conference in Las Vegas, Capture/RPA was front and center and a session on UiPath’s Document Understanding product drew a crowd that over□owed several rows deep into a hallway outside the session room. UiPath launched Document Understanding in 2020 and the ISV says that it is now being licensed by more than 1,100 customers, or more than 10% of UiPath’s overall customer base. By Ralph Gammon, Market Analyst for Capture Software, Infosource. Contact him: rg@info-source.com. UiPath, the End of the RPA Wars, and Enterprise Automation Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 4 Yes, UiPath is clearly investing in making its IDP technology better, with a fairly large development team already working on it, as well as the recent acquisition of Re:infer, a UK-based Communication Mining specialist. To date, Re:infer has primarily focused on email classi□cation and understanding, but UiPath has big plans for deploying the underlying NLP technology. This includes leveraging it in Document Understanding for processing unstructured documents like contracts, as well as integrating it with process mining for functionality like analyzing customer requests and automating the actions being taken in response. At Forward5, UiPath also showed a demo with Capture technology being integrated into its Clipboard AI desktop application for ad hoc extraction from documents like ID Cards and contracts. TWAIN Direct Developers Day Uncovers Lucrative Business Opportunities UiPath has set a goal of increasing its annual run rate to $5B and it views Enterprise Automation as the way to get there. If it wasn’t clear before, it is now: Capture/IDP is a key piece of UiPath’s expanded focus. In our latest forecast, which runs through 2026, Infosource Software has projected that the RPA-related Capture sales will grow more than twice as fast as traditional Capture SW sales, and UiPath looks positioned to be one of the major drivers for this. [Editor's note: We are proud sponsors of this event and believe in TWAIN's goals and mission.] As the excitement continues to build for on November 9 in Safety Harbor, Florida, we’d like to give you a sneak peak of what to expect. However, what’s absolutely remarkable already because we are only in the pre-event outreach and planning phase of Developers Day is that several lucrative business opportunities have surfaced as a result. TWAIN Direct Developers Day th Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 5 Firstly, the is laser- focused on maximizing productivity during Developers Day, so therefore we have created a dedicated cloud-hosted TWAIN Direct API sandbox, and developer account, for each developer attendee. And while the TWAIN Direct Developers Day doesn’t of□cially kick-off until setup during the evening of November 8 , this allows developers to get a jump start on their projects. In addition to the 30-days of hosting prior to Developers Day, thanks to the grateful TWAIN Direct Developer Day sponsors, we are also providing 60-days of post hosting services so that attendees can continue their development on their own without interruption. TWAIN Working Group agenda th Next, TWG has staged newly updated TWAIN Direct Cloud Express 2.0 source code on a private GitHub repository available exclusively to Developers Day attendees. This open-source code includes several integrated technologies to make a scanning application nearly production-ready by the end of day on November 9 ! Some of these items include SAML 2.0/Single-Sign On enterprise authentication, biometric multifactor authentication, an object storage service, an operations database, a messaging service plus a Web scanning application with image preview all packaged into one nice . TWAIN Direct th TWAIN Direct developer toolkit Since TWG has now provided the hosted in the cloud, and also provided all these open-source code tools with TWAIN Direct Cloud Express 2.0, naturally we need document scanners. We are pleased to share that as Silver Sponsor of Developers Day not only is providing their expertise on TWAIN Direct development and integration, they are also providing TWAIN Direct/VAST- supported document scanners for every single developer at the event! TWAIN Direct API Visioneer Xerox D70n Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 6 But TWAIN Direct Developers Day is not only about technology itself. With consensus among the TWAIN Working Group member companies, plus validated at our , it is clear that TWG wanted to offer more business-related activities and events to help drive more adoption for our industry ecosystem partners. Therefore, at Developers Day, there will be a separate “Business Track Roundtable” to discuss various hot top topics in the digital transformation market. The main intent of the Business Track is to collaborate and share, as an ecosystem, where we can plan effective go-to- market strategies for each of the participating companies or help individual persons in their jobs. TWAIN Focus Groups No matter whether attendees of TWAIN Direct Developers Day are attending the hands-on Technical Track or the Business Track roundtable, or a mixture of both, the creative energy for innovation, especially among , is exciting and infectious! Over the past few weeks as more ISV’s outside of the traditional ‘document management’-type companies have become aware of this event; it has caused a □urry of last-minute sign-ups to attend TWAIN Direct Developers Day. independent software companies for TWAIN Direct These ISV’s come from very different niche market segments such as inventory management with ERP, fraud detection, cybersecurity, or accounting. The common theme, however, among all these ISVs is that each appreciated the added value to their software, and their overall solution, with being able to offer a much more simpli□ed document scanning capability of zero-footprint TWAIN Direct technology. Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 7 A few of the ISVs participating in Developers Day include , ICE Health Systems (who is also an existing TWG member company), Barlea, iValt, and Famous Software. Verve Corporation Verve Corporation is a valued Bronze Sponsor of Developers Day and is creating a front-end TWAIN Direct scanning application to complement their . Verve Capture Suite has been working on a thin client/centralized scanner management cloud-hosting solution for some time and is now putting the □nal touches on their Web scan client application. ICE Health Systems has developed a blockchain application for “exceptional access” where owners, or “custodians,” of digital assets can truly own, provide authenticity, as well as provide authorized transferability of property such as medical records, home titles/mortgages, or land lease titles. Barlea provides biometric authentication technologies for use cases that require multifactor authentication, want to provide better user experiences for proof of identity, or both. This technology has already been integrated with the P3iD ScanBot TWAIN Direct Web scanning solution. iValt was originally not on TWG’s original marketing outreach and was introduced to Developers Day from one of their partner companies. As it turns out, Famous Software has an existing ERP application and will now be developing a TWAIN Direct scanning front-end. This is a perfect example for the viral nature of TWAIN Direct adoption amongst ISVs. Famous Software In closing, the TWAIN Working Group sincerely appreciates our valued sponsors of Visioneer, Verve, ServerProto, Keypoint Intelligence, Work□ow Magazine, and Document Imaging Report. Without them, our non-pro□t organization couldn’t have even considered hosting such a great event as TWAIN Direct Developers Day. Another extremely exciting part of the initial Developers Day outreach is that every single conversation is about a speci□c use case and, in many discussions about the scope of the development project, has led to uncovering speci□c and signi□cant end- user client ! revenue opportunities It’s already been such a rewarding experience as we’ve already all been working together in such a positive and collaborative effort to get the technology prepared…and we haven’t even gotten to the good part yet on November 8 and 9 at the Safety Harbor Resort and Spa! This is the true spirit and charter actually of the TWAIN Working Group because, after all, we develop an open-source image acquisition speci□cation and royalty-free sample source software. th th Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 8 It’s still not too late to join us at Developers Day and work with us on the building the next generation of PC-less document capture solutions. For more information on attending Developers Day please contact Erin Dempsey at or (910) 574-6631 Erin.Dempsey@twain.org Capture and IDP in the Middle East – An Update From the GITEX Global Event Sincerely, -TWAIN Working Group Marketing Committee Petra Beck, Infosource's Senior Analyst, Software ( ) attended the GITEX event to sharpen Infosource’s insights into industry trends in the Middle East. Much like the rest of the world, the opportunity for growth there (and in Africa) is strong. pb@info-source.com Here are her thoughts on the event. For our readers who are not familiar with GITEX, can you brie□y describe the event? DIR: GITEX is the abbreviation of Gulf Information Technology Exhibition. GITEX Global is an annual IT exhibition and conference in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. This year’s event – the 42 – took place from October 10-14 at the Dubai World Trade Centre. It exceeded pre-pandemic dimensions, with over 4,500 exhibitors and 100,000 visitors. nd What were your key reasons for attending? DIR: There are really two reasons. I attended GITEX a couple of years ago, so I knew that the event brought together thought leaders, key vendors, integrators, and end customers interested in digitalization and automation in the Middle East. Secondly, I see a signi□cant opportunity for Capture & IDP in the Middle East and wanted to deepen my analysis through discussions with local subject matter experts. What was your overall impression? DIR: Our only intention is to advocate for what we believe with TWAIN Direct, which is a new, modern, and innovative way to develop document scanning application with zero- footprint architecture. Based on the good experiences from Developers Day thus far we sincerely believe that everyone attending will bene□t tremendously from this amazing event. Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 9 What is remarkable is the international aspect of the event, starting with the multinational staff of Dubai-based exhibitors, a strong coverage of the Middle Eastern countries, a growing number of international vendors, in particular start-ups from Africa augmented by vendors headquartered in European and Asian countries and North America. In essence it brings together the entire IT industry active in the Middle East or planning to enter the Middle Eastern market in one place. Where do you see the largest opportunities in the Middle East? DIR: From a geographic point of view currently by far the largest markets for Capture and IDP are Saudi Arabia (KSA) and the UAE. In the future, there are several other countries – Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar, for instance – where demand will grow considerably over the next few years. The assessment conducted by Orient Planet Research illustrates the level of digitalization in the respective GCC countries. From a vertical point of view, the Public Sector accounts for at least half of the market opportunities in the Capture and IDP market at the moment. First of all, in the Middle East, including the largest markets of KSA and UAE, the Government is driving the digital transformation of the respective nations. In a way it felt like CeBIT during its peak years propelled into the next century. I understand that GITEX has become the largest IT event globally. This is even more remarkable as in general the days of large trade shows are over and people prefer smaller, industry-speci□c events – not to mention the shift to virtual events and meetings. Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 10 Saudi Arabia is implementing its 2030 vision in a step-by-step execution, which aims to digitally transform the country in a material way. The UAE started its goal to become a digital nation several years ago and prides itself on being largely paperless. It is important to note that the Public Sector extends into parts of the Private Sector where organizations are partly or fully government owned. This applies to the Energy sector, the Healthcare sector, and even the Banking and Financial Services market. There are also Capture and IDP opportunities in the Logistics and Hospitality sectors, in particular in the UAE, where both play a key role in the economy. Outsourcers play a role for the back□le conversion of paper documents but are less prominent in the automation of active business processes. What did you learn that surprised you? DIR: What impressed me the most is that the digitalization of the governments has advanced so much in the UAE. A couple of years ago I was impressed by the smart city concept for Dubai, which I felt was ahead of most major international cities. The digitalization of government agencies is no longer a concept in the Emirates, dashboards showed that they have been extensively deployed. What surprised me somewhat is the fact that the RPA market is in earlier stages. This stands in strong contrast to the use of actual robots in the public services, like law enforcement in the UAE that has been used for a number of years. Automation Anywhere was the only large RPA vendor exhibiting at GITEX, supported by a number of partners. And I confess that the signals I received about the market opportunity in Africa gives me con□dence that this continent may advance a bit faster than expected. However, we are still talking about a slow uptake. The startups featured at GITEX gave a small glimpse of the hunger for transformation and digital capabilities. The GITEX organization is reacting to this by launching GITEX Africa starting in 2023. What other announcements beyond the Capture & IDP market did you see at the event that you want to highlight for DIR readers? DIR: Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 11 Well, there is certainly the theme of the conference which was Web 3.0 and Metaverse. GITEX invited visionary speakers and vendors to envision the opportunity in the metaverse and to highlight use cases in the next generation of a virtual ecosystem. While many consumer-related use cases were showcased in gaming, retail, fashion, and sports there were also business-related use cases like ROOM, a browser-based 3D video conferencing tool announced as beta version by TMRW Foundation. There was an announcement of a □ying car designed and manufactured by XPENG ,a vendor of intelligent mobility solutions. Actually, there was the □rst public □ight for journalists to witness during GITEX. While there are other companies with similar technologies and aspirations, what is remarkable is that the collaboration with the Dubai Chamber of Commerce who showed keen interest in the concept. Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 12 Let’s start where we □rst met: AIIM and professional organizations in general. You’re actively involved in AIIM and ARMA. Why? What brought you to member organizations? DIR: The short answer: I have found them useful. My start in IT was in an IT support manager role (building servers and looking after 350 scientists on their Macs and PCs), not doing the information “stuff” I do now. Cawthorne: Since I didn’t come out of school as an IT professional [Ed note: more on that below], I came to IT as a career change, I found that professional bodies were useful for learning and networking and helping you □gure out some of the details. You know, you hear these job descriptions. You're like, well, what does that mean? What does that person do? What is this ECM thing? DIR: Exactly. I found the BCS, British Computer Society useful as a student studying computers. Then, as you progress through your career, they become more useful because now you know more about what you want to do. Cawthorne: Jed Cawthorne is Principle Evangelist for ShinyDocs. He has had a varied career, from IT support through ECM and knowledge management consultant to his new role with ShinyDocs. He is a frequent contributor to industry publications and a speaker at industry events. I □rst met Jed during my time as Community Manager at AIIM, where he helped to make me look smarter than I am. Among other plaudits, he is a member of AIIM’s Company of Fellows. Connect with Jed on LinkedIn: or drop him a line at . https://www.linkedin.com/in/gpcawthorne/ jcawthorne@shinydocs.com The DIR Interview: Jed Cawthorne Talks ECM, Mars, and Red Knights Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 13 Or if you want to change direction. Which is where AIIM comes in. These organizations become even more helpful because now you're more targeted and know what you're looking for and how they can help. And so for instance, when I was interested in moving from being a general-purpose IT support person to a more information management person, I found AIIM Europe very useful. There were all of these resources and the AIIM magazine had super useful articles and resources to learn about what it meant to be in information management. Plus the networking opportunities were great. I’ve often wondered about your path from serving in Her Majesty’s Navy into IT and how that has affected your career? DIR: My “job” as a radio operator – communication specialist – was reasonably techy. I joined young – at 16 and a half. My parents had to give permission for me to go on live operations in the Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war when I was 17 and a half or so. We were escorting tanker convoys through the Straits of Hormuz and things like that. Cawthorne: The techy side of communications really kindled my interest in information management. “Message handling” in the navy is really what we would call document management. Of course, it was paper-based then. We were printing things off teleprinters and stamping them with a big red rubber stamp that said “con□dential” or “secret.” We were writing them into logbooks by hand. But we went digital while I was in, and we changed over to digital communications systems. I’ve always been curious. Instead of reading a book when night watch was boring, I’d go into the operations room and get people to teach me their kit. I learned how to use all the different radars and some of the electronic warfare gear. When I was on a minesweeper, I was decent with SONAR, but that’s more of an art than a science, so you've really got to practice that one a lot. I enjoyed the techie, geeky element of all of that. And once out of the Navy? DIR: I did 10 years and left in the early 90s to work for another government agency. IT wasn’t my main job, but some people were trained to do IT as a side job. So I was trained as a Unix System Administrator on the old IBM AIX □avor of Unix. Cawthorne: I’ve heard you talk about your work on the Beagle 2 Mars Lander team, but never any detail. Was that the next stop on your career journey? DIR: Whilst I was working for that other government agency they paid for my education. So I went to university and got a degree in computing and then I went to work for the university. The Open University is one of the biggest distance learning universities in the world. In the UK it's also a top research school. It's really weird: there are no students on campus except the PhD-level students. Cawthorne: Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 14 So I got the job as the IT manager of the Science faculty. There were maybe seven of us supporting 350 scientists. The university was part of the conglomerate to build the Beagle 2 Mars Lander and the chief scientist, a wonderful gentleman called . Doctor Colin Pillinger Colin was a freaking pain in the *** in many respects. When I □rst met him, he didn't even have his own computer. He had an in tray and an out tray. His secretary would print out emails. He would read them and scribble all over them and put them in the out tray. She would then read his scribbles and type his response. Wow. I'm like, no, dude, that's wrong. This has to stop. You're the head of the Planetary & Space Sciences Research Institute. You need your own freaking laptop. And then because I was a bit . . . stronger with him than he was used to, he kind of like being challenged. So he asked me one day if I had heard about the Beagle, which, of course I had. OU was in a partnership with Leicester University, but he didn’t want them to take over everything. So he wanted me to go to a couple of meetings on behalf of OU because he □gured that since he couldn’t stomp on me, I wasn’t going to let anyone else. I thought it sounded interesting. I went to a couple of meetings and then he said, “I'm gonna ask the Dean if you can be seconded to the project because we need to build the lander operations planning center.” We had to build the clean rooms in which the probe was actually going to be built in a giant garage that had belonged to the BBC. The idea was to build the spaceship on-site. They wanted it to be digital. At the time, you would use laminated paper in a clean room – like you would physically bring in the circuit diagram or whatever. Colin wanted me to □gure out how to put digital into a clean room – that’s how I got involved. It was a LOT of fun. We solved the problem by having a giant glass wall and putting something like 38-inch plasma screens on the outside of the wall. With that, all we needed in the clean room was some special keyboards and mice that could be cleaned with solvents. And they ran through the false □oor through grommets. So we built the Lander Operations Planning Center, and we built the Engineering Operations Center at Leicester University with the help of Astrium the major contractor, and ESA. How do you bring digital documents into a clean room when you need to build a Mars Lander? Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 15 Once done, he had another job for me: the science data archiving manager. So I learned NASA’s planetary data system standards, which is really all about metadata – how you archive science data that comes back from science missions. While the Beagle crashed and we never got any science data, that role is what turned me on to information management and metadata and long-term digital preservation and all these other cool, nerdy disciplines that I hadn't really understood before the mission. You can really see the building blocks of your career. DIR: Very much being in the right place at the right time. Cawthorne: The second half of your work life, as you moved from IT management into consulting, has been ECM/KM-focused. Is that a direct line from the archival and metadata aspects of the Beagle work to moving into knowledge management and enterprise content management? DIR: Yeah. I found it all very interesting how we structured stuff. The people I was supporting had □le shares all over the place. The science faculty could only afford SharePoint 2001 and the maths faculty were using IBM and the Open University Library was on Open Text. Cawthorne: There was stuff all over the place and it was like, no wonder nobody can ever □nd anything. I sent the University’s head of enterprise architecture a note. Something like: University’s information management is awful. Nobody can □nd anything. Everybody's using different systems. We're not taking an enterprise view of this. He wrote back to my boss, the Dean of Science, and asked for some of my time to quote “put his money where his mouth is.” That turned into a half-time project with him, doing sort of an information audit – □nding all the systems that people were using and all the different types of information and data and content. Once done, we convinced ourselves that we needed to do – and this was 2004 – we needed ECM. So I jumped to be the full-time program manager for the Enterprise Content Management program, which was like a £4 million Investment. It was a big investment for the university's digital transformation before we were calling things digital transformation. Sometimes when you point out IT failings, you're invited to "put your money where your mouth is." Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 16 Let’s have one more career-related question before moving the conversation to the industry and trends. Not counting the Mars project, what’s been your favorite accomplishment or project that you've ever worked on? DIR: That’s an impossible question to answer – I’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy aspects of every project I’ve worked on. Cawthorne: Fair enough, □ipping gears here; this is intentionally vague: Where do you see the capture slash process slash content services industry heading over the next few years? DIR: Well, I think we have to be purposely vague because the interesting thing about the industry is the customers it serves. Let me say that I’ve made the transition from the buy-side to the sell-side, so with both of those perspectives plus reading the annual AIIM survey and attending conferences and reading, that it’s amazing how broad of a range of customers the industry has to serve. Some customers are extremely mature in their outlook and their technology. On the other hand, we've got people who are still on □le shares who look at scanning as if it's a revelation – like scanning a mass of paper is advanced. Cawthorne: Then there is an awful lot of organizations, of all sizes, that haven't had the chance to stop and breathe and do digitization or digitalization. They’re coming to it late because they're being pushed by regulatory concerns and/or privacy concerns or just plain business need – to compete and make money they need to be more ef□cient. Now they’re behind because it wasn't on top of their priority list. Then there are extremely digitally mature organizations talking about how they can do automated knowledge management using Microsoft Syntex and so on. What’s that mean for the industry? We’re still dealing with extreme ends of the spectrum. That makes selling and marketing a struggle. Do you address personas? Use cases. What about chasing the laggards still on □le shares. That’s not sexy, but somebody has to help them. One interesting challenge for the industry -- having to deal with customers at the extreme ends of the spectrum. On one end, scanning paper is seen as cutting edge; on the other, deciding how to use AI to extract maximum value from digital documents. Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 17 It’s funny to hear you mention “sexy.” Years ago, I was interviewing Baron Gemmer, President/Owner of ICS, at an AIIM conference, and we were having a conversation about “sexy/non-sexy” technology and trends. He said something that’s stuck with me, “You know what’s sexy? Making money.” Let the industry press and analysts □ght over sexy, just address the needs of the market. DIR: Anyway, What are what are companies still getting wrong about all of this stuff? I think at the most basic level, they don't understand the need. Returning to member organizations, that’s why the likes of AIIM and ARMA and various CIO organizations have to help with educating how managing data/information/content/records can help their business processes and help their business be more ef□cient. Cawthorne: I also think that they think it’s going to be really dif□cult, cost millions, and it’s going to be a huge program. So they put it off and procrastinate. In reality, just using a simple work□ow and maybe putting stuff in Box because it's got a search engine instead of putting it on 8 different □le shares – making an incremental improvement – can be a good way to start. People don’t seem to understand the business bene□ts of making simple incremental improvements. I’ve never thought about it that way, that folks over-complicate scanning or ECM. Since the World Series is happening, just get a base hit, right? DIR: Absolutely. And let’s go with football: concentrate on the next □rst down instead of looking for the Hail Mary. Don't look for that big strategic bang immediately. To push the football analogy, you're going to have to spend millions and millions of dollars to buy a top-notch franchise quarterback. But a lesser quarterback can still win you the game if he marches you down the □eld 10 yards at a time. Cawthorne: That’s pretty good for an Englishman [Jed is a Dolphins fan, since the Marino era]. DIR: Tell us a little bit about your role as an evangelist for ShinyDocs, and a bit about the company. Let’s start with the company. It’s a small but growing Canadian company. Most of the founders are out of OpenText so understand the ECM, information management, search kind of space. The company concentrated originally on adding value to OpenText customers as a partner and branched out from there. Cawthorne: Now we have connectors to a number of platforms, such as Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive, IBM FileNet, and OpenText (of course), and more. Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 18 Once we’re into these systems, we help you □nd stuff by searching so we can ful□ll an enterprise search use case. Beyond that, we can do text extraction and entity recognition and help you enrich that content. Why enrich it? Well, you can maybe move it into a different repository based on how you've classi□ed it. Or you could delete it because you've decided it's redundant, obsolete, or trivial. Or add some more metadata to it or change some permissions on it. We can do some clever custom review capabilities for customers who have complex engineering documents like CAD drawings. Using OCR we can actually look for a part number within the drawing. For instance, oil and gas is a big industry in Canada. There are utilities □rms who want to know where all the wellheads are and the type of valve on them. One customer is one of the bigger nuclear power utilities. As you can imagine, there are a lot of complex CAD drawings for nuclear power plants. I should clarify that we don’t just do oil and gas, but those are the examples that came to mind. There’s a phrase probably misattributed to Peter Drucker, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” I like to add to it, “If you can’t □nd it, you can’t measure it.” It’s almost like you’re an uber □le drive. DIR: Not sure I’d agree with that language though we can absolutely be an Uber □le drive. Shiny Drive is an add-on to OpenText, which exposes your OpenText repository in Windows Explorer (that's how the company started as an OpenText partner). The more interesting thing is the ability to get into all these different repositories. Cawthorne: The current interesting use case is something along the lines of “after 2 years of the pandemic, we have Microsoft Teams and now have 1,000 Team sites and we’re not entirely sure what's in them.” Right, that’s what I meant – you just sit on top of everything, like, gasp, federated search. DIR: Well, yeah, that is a core capability, but we don't like to concentrate messaging on that because, you know, it’s not cool or sexy. What I think IS cool is what you gonna do with all your stuff once you □nd it? Cawthorne: We’ll create some nice dashboards to show you what it is and where it is and how old it is and who was the last person who touched it. From there, you might decide that all your drawings need to be moved into OpenText while all of these invoices need to be moved into SharePoint. If you can't □nd it, you can't measure it. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 19 So what is involved with your new role of evangelist? DIR: I’m four weeks in, so it’s early days, but there’s an internal role to help marketing and sales. So I'm doing a lot of work right now on personas and things like that with our marketing director. The external evangelism, I guess really started at the ARMA conference last week (October 17). Cawthorne: We’re growing rapidly – headcount doubled in the last year. Jason Cassidy, our CEO, is proli□c on LinkedIn and YouTube. We do interviews and have a YouTube channel that's full of content. Since he’ll be a little too busy running a much bigger company, I’ll take over a good bit of that. We think that the rising tide raises all boats, so we want to make sure that we're addressing the questions of AIIM members, ARMA members, CIO association members, etc. We want to add to that kind of generic industry education, getting the message out there about why data and information management is important – how it can help the business. That’s in line with what outgoing AIIM President Peggy Winton spoke about at the AIIM Conference earlier this year – improving overall information literacy. It might not result in a sale for ShinyDocs, but it might result in a sale for somebody. More importantly, it might help a company improve its capabilities and do a better job managing their information. As you were talking, I couldn’t help but loop back to the beginning of our conversation about your learning from associations early in your career and now you’re paying that back. DIR: That’s a lovely point, thank you. We do think industry associations are important. Jason is an AIIM board member. We want to help improve understanding of the industry for everyone because even if it doesn’t result in a sale for us, it helps the industry grow as a whole. Cawthorne: This one just popped into my head – what’s been your favorite role so far in your career? DIR: [For the record, Jed was a bit stumped on this one. Other than KPMG, which the role didn’t align with the original interview, he’s enjoyed all of them. He did mention legal knowledge management at the Bank of Montreal as one that stood out.] So what about low code as a trend? Is it still a trend? Cawthorne: Fair point, I guess that’s like calling “the cloud” a trend. DIR: Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 20 There is, however, a trend line to follow – increased use. The Jack is out of the box, and you need to □gure out where it □ts best. Whilst I think there are some extremely powerful toolkits and I'm all for it as a movement, I think we need to carefully consider the governance of the code that is written by businesspeople using low code and the potential information security impacts and things like that. Cawthorne: Somebody needs to be doing the QA. Somebody needs to be helping them with good practice. Somebody needs to be vetting the code before it gets run for 1,000 people. I never can articulate this exactly, but between the lack of IT expertise/bodies to □ll positions and the ability to provision IT resources with cloud services and to use low code to build work□ows, etc.; is there an “IT-ish” career for folks who don’t know how to do IT things like code, etc. but who can manage a cloud-based “IT stack”? DIR: Maybe so. When I was running a department of eight serving 350 people, we had to know the different desktop operating systems, Windows services, a Unix box or two, and a variety of other things. Now those would all be cloud services that I need to know just enough to integrate them together. Cawthorne: I guess you could use Microsoft Power Automate or something similar to create that connective tissue. Maybe “IT” changes and you don’t need a four-year degree to learn to code to be an “IT professional.” So you might not need to know how to code Ruby on Rails, but you do need to understand the basics of something? Back to the question of governance and security, the more you understand how code works, even if you're using drag and drop tools, hopefully you can better understand the potential security pitfalls. I think there is a role for a “differently educated” class of semi-IT jobs, while, of course, still needing “pure” IT professionals for system admin, developer, etc. This opens the role for people to be more interested in the data or the information that is being manipulated by these systems than about code that does the manipulation. This could be really important for small to medium businesses. Years ago, you needed an expert to handle in-house servers. That’s on the cloud now, so you need someone who understands the cloud toolkits, even if they might not understand how to change a faulty drive or power supply like a “traditional” IT pro. I think there is a role for a "di□erently eductated" class of semi-IT jobs, while, of course, still needing "pure" IT professionals for system admin, developer, etc. Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 21 Last question, How did you become the Red Knight? [On Facebook, Jed frequently shares photos of himself sewing his kit, practicing with the sword, etc. – it’s really cool for my inner history nerd.] DIR: When we got to Canada, my then 7-year-old son found a fencing club. It was modern sport fencing. Then the guy running it started doing historical fencing, which was rapier. So I did rapier for years and then I met some guys who did Italian longsword. Through them I met guys who were both reenactors and what we call HEMA, Historical European Martial Arts. That’s the □ghting in armor. Cawthorne: It’s fun and hard work. I'm 56 now, with arthritis in my shoulders so wearing armor for a couple of hours and bashing people makes me kind of sore at the end of the day. Basically, we can blame it all on my son who decided he wanted to take up fencing as a sport. Jed on the left in Green and Red And we end this issue with a few photos of the Red Knight in Action! Insert your Monty Python joke here. Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 22 Jed on the right Jed on the right in red Document Imaging Report 11-3-22 Page 23 DIR is published approximately 15 times per year by: Infosource SA Avenues des Grande-Communes 8, 1213 Petit-Lancy, Geneva, Switzerland http://www.info-source.com Copyright @ 2022 by Infosource SA. Federal copyright law prohibits unauthorized reproduction by any means including photocopying or facsimile distribution of this copyrighted newsletter. Such copyright infringement is subject to □nes of up to $25,000. Because subscriptions are our main source of income, newsletter publishers take copyright violations seriously. Some publishers have prosecuted and won enormous settlements for infringement. 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