Intelligent Capture enables Digital Transformation at #ABBYYSummit16

I’ve been in beautiful San Diego for the past couple of days at the ABBYY Technology Summit, where I gave the keynote yesterday on why intelligent capture (including recognition technologies and content analytics) is a necessary onramp to digital transformation. I started my career in imaging and workflow over 25 years ago – what we would now call capture, ECM and BPM – and I’ve seen over and over again that if you don’t extract good data up front as quickly as possible, then you just can’t do a lot to transform those downstream processes. You can see my slides at Slideshare as usual:

I’m finishing up a white paper for ABBYY on the same topic, and will post a link here when it’s up on their site. Here’s the introduction (although it will probably change slightly before final publication):

Data capture from paper or electronic documents is an essential step for most business processes, and often is the initiator for customer-facing business processes. Capture has traditionally required human effort – data entry workers transcribing information from paper documents, or copying and pasting text from electronic documents – to expose information for downstream processing. These manual capture methods are inefficient and error-prone, but more importantly, they hinder customer engagement and self-service by placing an unnecessary barrier between customers and the processes that serve them.

Intelligent capture – including recognition, document classification, data extraction and text analytics – replaces manual capture with fully-automated conversion of documents to business-ready data. This streamlines the essential link between customers and your business, enhancing the customer journey and enabling digital transformation of customer-facing processes.

I chilled out a bit after my presentation, then decided to attend one presentation that looked really interesting. It was, but was an advance preview of a product that’s embargoed until it comes out next year, so you’ll have to wait for my comments on it.

A well-run event with a lot of interesting content, attended primarily by partners who build solutions based on ABBYY products, as well as many of ABBYY’s team from Russia (where a significant amount of their development is done) and other locations. It’s nice to attend a 200-person conference for a change, where – just like Cheers – everybody knows your name.