Document Imaging Technology >> Image Management

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Document Imaging Technology >> Image Management

4/29/2005

By Jennifer Jones

Tighter links between DI, online processing, and document management solutions, are improving student services and increasing administrative efficiency.

By Jennifer Jones

No one doubts that document imaging's strongest appeal to date lies in the technology's promise to eliminate paper and free up real estate-a proposition that soundly resonates with budget makers. In fact, finance officials over the years have consistently loosened the purse strings for limited DI endeavors, and homegrown scanning and archiving solutions now punctuate various departments of many campuses. But DI is fast becoming far more than just a way to archive paper vaults and vanquish vast stores of backlogged student records. Tighter links between DI and document management solutions, and DI's increasing role in many online processing efforts, are now yielding improved student services and administrative efficiencies.

At New Orleans' Tulane University-below sea level and continually facing the danger of flooding-administrators have every reason to want paper documents out of cardboard boxes, off the floors, and into an imaged format. Yet, like many institutions across the country, Tulane is approaching document imaging (DI) not solely as an exercise in paper reduction, but also as a way to revamp paper-intensive processes. "Five to 10 years ago, DI was just a way to pursue a paperless environment," says Mike Britt, Tulane's director of Document and Visual Communications. "There was very little data management built into the process. But we now have some really progressive thinking around data imaging."

Working with Xerox Global Solutions (www.xerox.com), Tulane currently has major departmental DI solutions in its Payroll, Accounts Receivable, and Registrar's offices. Within Payroll, for instance, the staff's monthly timesheets are imaged and stored, thus eliminating the department's need to hang on to signed versions of these documents. But Tulane officials want to build on these basic applications.

"We're evaluating the needs we have, once the document is imaged," says Britt, "and we're looking at things such as how we want to connect imaged documents to forms completed online. We're also looking at ways to take from electronically-completed forms data that typically g'es into a database, and save that in a format such as a PDF. This way, the forms that never made it to paper are stored as documents in the document system," he adds.

Paper Problem, or Broken Process?

Like Tulane, most college and university administrators now realize that, as in large corporations, there is a serious need to get rid of paper. But according to Peter Grant, a Gartner analyst (www.gartner.com), the problem g'es beyond paper glut. "We've been banging on enterprises and universities with the notion that paper is a sign of a broken system."

Though fully tuned in to such warnings, some institutions are reluctant to recognize their paper problems as a symptom of broken process. Yet, paper that bogs down operations in key student services offices such as Admissions and Financial Aid, and in administrative outposts such as Accounts Payable and Human Resources, is usually a prime indicator of larger process problems, says Grant.