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I thought this article was going to be as easy as responding to the title with a single word “disappointment.” However, when I started thinking about user expectations of document recognition technologies I realized the biggest problem with purchasers is they don’t even know what’s realistic or over the moon. Technology should always exceed your expectations. But, when it seems like magic, users may overlook the processes and best practices that allow that magic to happen. This article should empower you, the purchaser of advanced recognition technologies, with the state of mind to know the difference between technology magic and reality.

Demos are always impressive.  I’m fond of referring to the initial canned demo of document recognition technologies as the “Disney experience of document recognition.”  Usually, it’s pretty obvious that any canned demo will wow you, but when it comes to a vendor demo on your own documents, it’s less obvious.  What a vendor typical does is to obtain a collection of your live documents and shows you the software in action on them.  These demos are usually round two after you have seen the initial canned demo, but some forward thinking vendors will insist on it being the first demo.  Keep in mind that such a specialized demonstration is dealing with a small subset of your actual environment and quite contained.  This allows the rapid development of a very accurate demonstration because when it comes to these technologies 10% of your integration time is initial setup meeting all requirements and 90% is fine-tuning.  Most any small sample set only falls into the 10% category of setup time.  Not to mention that ALL these solutions have shortcuts that are great for showing potential quickly, but useless in production.  These demos are imperative to see how technology is setup and behaves on your documents whether it be good, bad and ugly. But keep in mind that it will always WOW you.  The demo may be a guide to where you can get, but should not be your initial expectation at first launch.

Understanding this is so powerful.  It means you will approach the technology with a cautious excitement that will force you to put the business processes in place to improve the recognition stepwise versus the common “make it perfect from day one” strategy.  It should also force you to first automate what you can most easily, then move on to the rest.  Now you can handle exceptions with scrutiny and only fine-tune for expectations that repeat with a high frequency and opportunity cost.

Vendors know their technology, but have no idea how you will use it.  It’s a classic assumption people make that the vendors know how you process your documents.  While all vendors have gained specialized education in each document type vertical, they only posses an objective understanding of what each document is. There are as many ways of handling documents as there are companies doing it.  Many fail to realize that the business process is just as much a factor in integration success as is the document types themselves.  You simply can’t expect the vendors to take the time to understand your specific business process associated with a particular document type you are automating.  Unless you enter into a professional services agreement with the vendor, assume they know nothing more than the types of documents you are processing and what the general population seems to do with them.

Understanding this means you keep some responsibility in your court.  You know better than anyone how you currently process documents and what the impact of automation will be in the current process.  You also know better than anyone how your organization approaches and handles change.  These are things they may expect answers from the vendor on and it simply won’t happen.  It’s your responsibility to give enough details to the vendor that they can point out areas of focus during integration, and your responsibility not to delegate this portion to your vendor.

Something will always break, how you will handle it?  I’m sorry, yes, there will be problems, there will be that one invoice that has that one invoice number which is always misrecognized.  I’ve always been surprised at organizations that approach me in frustration and point out issues they are facing that seem to diminish the value of the entire solution.  After investigating the entire production process I often tell myself, “wow, I’m impressed these guys are ahead of the game and doing a great job at automating a very high volume of documents.”  It could be that one field on that one invoice has created a situation of panic that blinds people to what is really happening and blinds them to the, often, simple solution.  A lot of these companies have already hit an ROI and have potential for even greater success, but don’t know it.  The commonality in all these organizations is that they assumed from the get go that problems of this sort would not happen.  Very often the technical department is realistic, but the louder business unit is not. 

The goal first should be to reconcile the understanding across the organization’s constituents.  I understand there may be some technical boundaries, but I guarantee the exercise will be better for all.  Once you have done this make an action plan on how to address those oh so frustrating problems when they occur.  Set yourself up to win by preparing to manage failure.

Document recognition is magical and exceeds even my expert’s eye expectations every day.  But I and many other organizations that have done their homework know what the proper expectations are and what to do to achieve them.  Hopefully you now can do the same. Document recognition is an interpretive technology and you have to give it the best chance of showing you what it can do.

Chris Riley (chris.riley@livinganalytics.com) is founder of Living@nalyitcs (www.livinganalytics.com) where he uses his in-depth knowledge of data capture technologies to advise clients and proselytize the value of these tools.

Chris recently was the feature speaker for our webinar on March 5; Tips and Tricks to Help You Automate your Office Documents (for Effective Data Capture). Listen at www.aiim.org/webinararchive.