Photocopy King Pushes Paperless Office
By Ashlee Vance
It’s a bit rich for Xerox, the company whose name became synonymous with photocopying, to claim that a morass of paper stands as one of the grand challenges still haunting “knowledge workers.” After all, Xerox and its ilk have helped push us to the point where a paperless office is more of a joke than a realistic goal.
But that’s exactly the message the company is peddling these days, as it continues to expand beyond the copier into a broad set of document management products and services.
During a recent visit, Eric Armour, Xerox’s vice president of corporate business strategy, said technology companies should spend less time creating widgets and mash-ups and more time on making it easier to perform important functions such as going to the doctor’s office or buying a house.
Xerox’s latest push centers on how organizations can benefit from making better use of documents that have been converted to digital form.
Some of Xerox’s pitch revolves around very basic ideas. It wants customers to move from single-function products such as printers and faxes to now-affordable multi-function systems. In addition, the company stresses that injecting a bit of color into a presentation can illuminate important ideas and save time. (And wouldn’t you know it, Xerox executives highlight their names in indigo on their business cards.)
Xerox offers programmable software interface for its multi-function products that allows organizations to tweak the devices to suit their needs. A school in Pennsylvania has tapped this technology for processing new students by scanning in documents such as birth certificates and old transcripts and then using the information to fill out fields in documents used throughout the school district, Mr. Armour said.
Or consider the mortgage business. In September 2007, Xerox purchased a mortgage document management software maker, Advectis, for $32 million. The acquired BlitzDocs technology moves electronic copies of mortgage documents between brokers, banks and appraisers.
“This limits putting anything into a paper format until its absolutely necessary,” Mr. Armour said. With a bit of luck, going the electronic route should save time for all parties.
Xerox is now looking for ways to take this type of software to other industries.
On the legal front, Xerox has software that can churn through the thousands and thousands of pages of documents collected during the discovery phase of a trial and pick out the relevant items. In addition, researchers at Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center lab, which operates as an independent subsidiary, have developed technology which can automatically conceal portions of legal documents to protect sensitive information.
The goal of saving time and money by using technology to help out with mundane tasks seems practical enough.
More challenging, however, is the objective Xerox and others have of battling all of the e-mails, text messages and phone calls that overwhelm workers.
The company has joined the likes of Google, Microsoft, I.B.M. and Intel to form the Information Overload Research Group. The organization says it’s “reducing information pollution” and lists thing such as feeds, voice mails, social networks, interruptions, blogs, Web 2.0 services and search engines as polluters.
But wait, aren’t companies like Google and I.B.M. pushing these types of services at full tilt?
Yes, but sometimes you need to move a lot of paper before you can rid offices of the stuff, and sometimes you need to create some feeds and blogging tools to make it easier to find just the information you want.
Or so I’m told.
Original Post