Does anyone doubt that insurers are paper factories? Getting control of paperthe reports, forms, requests, correspondence, and other debris littering the halls of insurance companiescan yield tremendous results. That means document management technology: scanning and imaging hardware; character recognition software; storage, archival and retrieval systems; and a workflow system to tie the components together.
As is the rule in technology, speed and capabilities continue to increase in document management systems while relative costs continue to drop. In the scanning and image-capture market, speed means greater throughput (pages per minute). Today, there are a host of high-speed production scanners on the market that not only capture and color-correct imagesimportant for many types of color-coded insurance documents as well as photographsbut also read barcodes and perform optical character and intelligent character recognition (OCR and ICR). Some come bundled with document management applications that can automatically route images to storage devices, Web portals, or even individual users work queues.
Recognition software, long limited to interpreting only clear, large, machine-printed text, has evolved to the point where it can read hand-printed text and natural handwriting. While the software may not be able to read your typical doctors scrawl, vendors are now offering recognition systems that promise 100 percent recognition of printed text along with accuracy of handwritten text in the high-90-percent range (although you should test those claims for yourself). When text recognition fails, fault referral features allow manual review of documents.

Going With the Flow
Remember when a one-gigabyte hard drive was huge? The capacity of storage devices, whether installed on RAID, NAS, SAN, or other storage systems, continues to grow, as do storage media choices: hard disks, CD and DVD-ROM, and gold ol magnetic tape are among the most popular.
But the last component of content management is perhaps most important: workflow. More than simply scanning paper, todays document management means effectively routing, storing, and locating imaged documents. Document management should be viewed not as simply scanning and storing paper, but as a process that moves from start to finish across the enterprise. Insurers also need to consider users outside their walls, such as agents and policyholders, who need access to documents such as applications and declarations.
Thats the philosophy embraced by document management system vendors and consultants, who continue to develop out-of-the-box technologies and systems that allow insurers to manage the entire workflow of documents externally received and internally created. Document management techniques are also being designed to distribute tasks to the numerous authors and document users throughout the enterprise: Consider that scanners are turning up frequently in the workplace as components of copiers and fax machines, and familiar tools such as instant messaging, online meetings, and other Web-based collaboration systems have been integrated with document management systems.
The technology of content management takes document management one step further, allowing the information on a particular document to be managed regardless of the form of the document. At its most basic, that information could be metadatainformation about the document itself. But ideally in this Web-enabled world, all content can be stored in a media-neutral state, such as XML, to be formatted, repurposed, and, yes, even printed in any number of formats. Insurers can find document management systems and components built with content management in mind, and many traditional document management vendors have evolved their services to offer management and control of information beyond static images.
If youre looking for an objective view of what you need to tame the paper tiger within your company, look no further than this session. Well lay out all the options for you.

Would you like
to know more?