AIIM Fellow 185: Barry Brueseke

Barry Brueseke: Fellow 185

An early innovator in the document capture/forms processing market, Barry has 30 years of experience in the computer industry. He has been a programmer, project manager, test engineer, firmware developer, manager of software support, director of IT, systems architect, entrepreneur, startup co-founder, vp of operations, executive board member, retiree, and, currently, investor in a startup company. Without his dedication, AIIM’s San Diego Chapter (on whose board he has served continuously since 1992) would have vanished on several occasions. He was awarded AIIM’s Distinguished Service Award in 1999.

Infonomics: You founded Wheb Systems (which merged with FormWare Corporation to create Captiva Software, subsequently purchased by EMC) in 1990. What was the business opportunity that lead you do that?

Brueseke: My partner, Jim Woodruff, and I had been working as contract engineers in the Satellite communications industry. We wanted to stop making products for other people and set out to startup our own company. As we surveyed the overall computer market space looking for a niche with an untapped need we came up with the general idea that the 1980s had been the decade of the database and looking forward (in 1990) the 1990s were going to be the decade when imaging technology became a normal part of the business computing environment. This concept lead us to explore the imaging market and as we did; we asked ourselves why everyone was so excited about the idea of scanning all their documents. At first, we thought it was because they would be able to eliminate filing cabinets and the associated overhead costs (labor, folders, floor space, etc.). However, after talking with managers at insurance companies, hospitals, and several other prospective users of imaging technology we came to understand that the benefits they were looking to gain from imaging systems were actually reductions in “soft” costs.

For example, if an insurance company could reduce the time it took to locate a customer’s policy, then they could increase customer satisfaction by providing faster service. In the early 90s it was normal for large insurance companies to have paper file access times from 30 minutes to 2 hours. So if a customer called in with a question about their policy, the agent would take down their question and contact information and tell them he’d call them back in a couple of hours with the answer. Then the agent would fill out a file request form, get up from his desk, walk over to the file room, hand in the request, and go back to his desk to wait for the policy file to be delivered before he could research the question and call the customer back. Imaging technology brought with it the hope that agents would be able to immediately view digital copies of insurance policies on their desktop computers and therefore provide real time responses to customer inquiries. This prompt and efficient service would result in customers who were happier with their service, more loyal to the corporate brand, and more likely to refer their friends to the company.

The concept that imaging systems ROI should be based on soft costs instead of hard costs led us to another question. What was it that the potential customer really wanted ? Was it just the picture of a document on the screen or was there something more that could potentially represent a “compelling” reason to buy? As we thought about this question we came to believe that what the imaging system user really wanted was not just a picture of the document, but the information that was on the page. For example, in order to retrieve an insurance policy from an imaging system it would be necessary to index the document by some key value, say policy number. In order to answer a question such as “When does my policy expire ?” it would be necessary to have data on the policy date(s).

Once again we surveyed the computer technology market, looking to see if there were any companies with products that offered the features that we believed potential customers might want. What we found was that in 1990 there were many companies such as Caere, Calera, and Kurzweil offering products which provided both scanning and optical character recognition. However, we found almost no companies which combined scanning and the recognition of hand printed information (ICR). It was at this point in our thought process that we decided we had found the untapped market niche that we had been searching for and started to design our product; IFPS, the Intelligent Forms Processing System.
 
As we formulated our design and defined the features/functions of our product we started sending out information to our friends (email was a new thing back then) asking them to look for business opportunities which might be a fit for our product. One of our friends had contacts in the California state government and he let us know about an RFP from the California Department of Fish and Game. The RFP requested bids for a system to scan hunting and fishing licenses. We were excited and quickly sent in letters requesting to be put on the bidders list. Our excitement did not last long because when we received a copy of the RFP and reviewed the requirements we found out that the system was supposed to be able to scan documents and sort out “good and bad” forms into separate piles using a moveable output tray. We tried hard, but we could not find a commercially available scanner which had this feature. Once the bid was awarded, we learned that the contract was awarded to Scan-Optics and subsequently we became familiar with their product line.

However, we were young and energetic and not to be deterred. We wrote letters to the Fish and Game department complaining that their requirements were tailored to a single company’s solution. We complained that they did not provide an opportunity for a small business such as ours (two guys with an idea) to compete. We suggested that they define the requirements such that potential bidders could use an open systems approach to provide a solution. We hinted that they might end up with a cheaper solution if their scanner specifications were based on commercial, off the shelf products (this was long before COTS was a well known acronym).

Luckily for us, the CA Fish and Game department read our letters and decided to implement our ideas in their next project. RFP-18 asked bidders to provide a solution (using commercially available components) to scan landing receipts, automatically recognize the hand printed information filled in by Sport Fishing Boat Captains defining the amount of fish caught that day, and then upload that information into the department of Fish and Game’s COBAL-based fish tracking system.

It took us about two months to craft a our proposal, but in the end it was worth the effort because we won the bid and for about $72,000 the state of California, Department of Fish and Game, Long Beach Statistical unit received the first Window- based automated forms processing system capable of reading hand printed information.

FYI, for all those techie folks who can remember this far back, it was actually DOS 3.3, running both Windows 3.1 and OS/2 1.1. We had to use OS/2, because at that time Windows did not support multi-tasking and one of the requirements was that the system had to scan, process, and edit data all at the same time. The hardware consisted of two Intel 386 boxes, one of which was connected to a Fujitsu scanner. The other 386 machine acted as a file server and also hosted the HNC Quickstrokes neural network recognition engine.

Infonomics: You’ve been on the board of the San Diego chapter since 1992. How have you kept interest for so long in that task?

Brueseke: At first it was the friendships I developed with other board members. Then as old members drifted away and new folks joined it was the challenge of keeping the chapter alive. These days, I look on my board member duties as a service I can provide to the local community. For me, it is a way to give something back to the industry that provided me an opportunity to be a successful entrepreneur.

Infonomics: Why are chapters important?

Brueseke: Chapters are important for two reasons: One, regular meetings provide an opportunity for users and vendors to meet in a neutral setting designed to exchange exchange in an educational manner. Two, local chapters provide an opportunity for people in the industry to feel connected, to know that the issues they are facing are not unique. The regular chapter meeting provides a forum to meet people, make friends, and learn something new. The local board provides members from both the vendor and the user communities with opportunities for professional growth.

Infonomics: Back to an industry question, what do you find most interesting about the capture portion of the ECM industry?

Brueseke: Personally, I have always been interested in scanner hardware. Things such as the light source, the optics, the resolution, the type of camera, the feeders, the rollers, even the type of paper . . . it takes so many moving parts all working together to create accurate digital images reliably, day after day. I have often worked late into the night trying to figure out why a recognition workflow that was working just fine one day suddenly developed a 50% read rate the next day. Most of the time you can trace this type of problem back to one of the many component parts of a scanner.

For example, did you know that when a roller wears out it gets smaller? And that in some scanners a smaller roller will result in the paper moving past the camera faster? And that when this happens your image size changes? And that when your image size changes, even by as little as 1/8 of an inch, that is enough to throw off a recognition system which expects data to be in a certain spot?

Infonomics: How do you see capture evolving?

Brueseke: I see the scanner manufacturers bundling more capture products into their sales process. Examples of this would be the Kodak and IBML. Compared with 5 years ago, both of these companies have greatly expanded the features that their capture software provides. They have also started to develop pricing models which will ensure that they maximize the revenue associated with the various features of the capture software they sell.

I also see the content management companies reaching downstream into the capture market, trying to maximize their revenues by incorporating full-featured capture solutions as part of their product suite. On example of this is the EMC purchase of Captiva. This acquisition allowed EMC to bundle InputAccel into many of their enterprise deals, thus ensuring that more of their customers dollars were spent with EMC rather than on a third-party capture solution. That was three years ago, but I think that the trend continues. Content management companies will continue to enhance the features/capabilities of their capture solutions, either via acquisition or by internal product development.

Both of these trends lead me to the conclusion that the market for pure capture products is getting smaller. There may still be good opportunities for companies with products designed to feed SharePoint systems, but even if this segment does produces increasing unit sale numbers over the next 3 years, the revenue associated with the pure capture market will continue to decline because of the loss of market share due to the trends I mentioned previously.

Infonomics: What’s the most interesting implementation you ever worked on?

Brueseke: The most interesting implementation that I worked on was the credit card application processing system we designed for Citibank. That system was delivered in multiple phases over several years. I can’t speak about the specific details, but in the end there were multiple processing centers spread across several states in the US as well as other countries. The daily volume of credit card applications was staggering and the uptime requirements meant that everything had to work right, all the time. The implementation was difficult and complex. Citibank’s security requirements were extreme, but their infrastructure was superb. It was very interesting to see how they networked their business units together. Once the system was up and running, I can remember standing on the floor of one of the data entry centers, watching all the operators using our system to process credit applications and knowing that everyone in the world who applied for a Citibank credit card, only got it after their form went through our system.

Infonomics: What does being named a Fellow mean to you?

Brueseke: For me, being a Fellow brings with it recognition of my contribution to the development of the capture market and my years of service on the local AIIM board. I am grateful for this award and I hope to continue serving AIIM in a positive way as the future unfolds.