Bud Porter-Roth, an accomplished Enterprise Content Management consultant, authored a paper in 2005 that called for document imaging products to work better together.
Individuals and corporations were by then fully familiar with the basics of translating paper into digital images, but the time had come to do more.
Porter-Roth wrote of a pressing challenge:
"As EDM becomes integrated with more mainstream applications, the stumbling block has become the need to hardwire each EDM application to each business or legacy application. The programming effort for this is high, the programming is not reusable, and once made, the connections are fragile. The resulting complex network still does not provide the interoperability needed to share data efficiently and often companies are forced to re-key data from one system to another. Data sharing is often limited by the inability to connect applications due to programming complexity, costs, and time."
The solution proposed by Porter-Roth (and other experts) was to concentrate as much on systems working together as on the systems themselves. This focus was called Service Oriented Architecture, or SOA.
SOA, as a concept, if not as an acronym, has made great strides in the document imaging industry. The standardization of programming language XML has been instrumental in this drive towards interopability.
However, the interopability issue still remains a top priority for the industry as well as its clients. Document imaging service providers who have mastered this domain are the companies to work with.
Ask about interoperability--every time.
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