I run a software company called Knowledgeone Corporation that produces an enterprise content management solution called RecFind 6 that includes extensive document imaging capabilities. We have thousands of customers around the world and as far as I can see most use RecFind 6 for document imaging of one kind or another.

This certainly wasn’t the case twenty years ago when document imaging tools were difficult to use and were expensive stand-alone ‘specialised’ products. Today however, almost every document management or records management product includes document imaging capabilities as a normal part of the expected functionality. That is, document imaging has gone from being an expensive specialised product to just a commodity, an expected feature in almost any information management product.

This means most customers have a readily available, easy-to-use and cost-effective document imaging tool at their fingertips. That being the case there should be no excuse for not utilizing it to save both time and money. However, I guarantee that I could visit any of my customers and quickly find unrealised opportunities for them to increase productivity and save money by using the document imaging capabilities of my product RecFind 6. They don’t even have to spend any money with me because the document imaging functions of RecFind 6 are integrated as ‘standard’ functionality and there is no additional charge for using them.

So, why aren’t my customers and every other vendor’s customers making best use of the document imaging capabilities of their already purchased software?

In my experience there are many reasons but the main ones are:

Lack of knowledge

To the uninitiated document imaging may look simple but there is far more to it than first appears and unless your staff have hands-on experience there is unlikely to be an ‘expert’ in your organization. For this reason I wrote a couple of Blogs earlier this year for the benefit of my customers; Estimating the cost of your next imaging job and The importance of document imaging. This was my attempt to add to the knowledge base about document imaging.

Lack of ownership

The need for document imaging transects the whole enterprise but there is rarely any one person or department charged with ‘owning’ this need and with applying best-practice document imaging policies and procedures to ensure that the organization obtains maximum benefits across all departments and divisions. It tends to be left to the odd innovative employee to come up with solutions just for his or her area.

Lack of consultancy skills

We often say that before we can propose a solution we need to know what the problem is. The way to discover the true nature of a problem is to deploy an experienced consultant to review and analyse the supposed problem and then present an analysis, conclusions and recommendations that should always include a cost-benefit analysis. In our experience very few organizations have staff with this kind of expertise.

Negative impact of the Global Financial Crisis that began in 2008

All over the world since 2008 our customers have been cutting staff and cutting costs and eliminating or postponing non-critical projects. Some of this cost cutting has been self-defeating and has produced negative results and reduced productivity. One common example is the cancelling or postponing of document imaging projects that could have significantly improved efficiency, productivity and competitiveness as well as reducing processing costs.  This is especially true if document imaging is combined with workflow to better automate business processes.  I also wrote a Blog back in July 2012 for the benefit our customers to better explain just what business process management is all about called Business Process Management, just what does it entail?

In answer to the original question I posed, yes you can save money utilizing simple document imaging functionality especially if you combine the results with new workflow processes to do things faster, more accurately and smarter. It is really a no-brainer and it should be the easiest cost justification you have ever written.

We have already seen how most information management solutions like RecFind 6 have embedded document imaging capabilities so most of you should have existing and paid-for document imaging functionality you can leverage off.

All you really need to do to save your organization money and improve your work processes is look for and then analyse any one of many document imaging opportunities within your organization.

A clue, wherever there is paper there is a document imaging opportunity.

I have been in the application software industry for most of my professional life. I started in bureaus designing and programming bespoke applications for a variety of clients then moved to mainframes and online and real time application software development and then to my own software company in 1984. I have worked with thousands of customers and hundreds of applications and I have never seen any customer use anything like one hundred-percent of an application’s functionality.

Whenever I visit my customers there is a common dialog that goes along the lines of, “It would be great if RecFind could do …….” To which my reply always is, “Actually it can, would you like me to show you?”

Yes, before you ask, we do provide detailed help screens and manuals and both classroom and online training. We also have a plethora of helpful information on our website including white papers, a Knowledgebase & FAQs, News, helpful hints, product descriptions, etc., etc.

We also employ inside sales people who talk regularly to our customers and we communicate via newsletters and emails and, of course, this blog.

There is no shortage of information on what our products can do. There is however, still a big gap between what our products can do and what our customers understand about the capabilities of our products. From my experience, the knowledge gap is common across all products and software vendors because no one has yet come up with a mechanism to continually train and remind the customer’s personnel about a product’s complete functionality and entire range of capabilities.

Nor, do I suspect, would the average customer’s end user be too happy about being bombarded with unsolicited information of this kind. The fact is people only have time to work on a need-to-know basis. They only want to know enough to get the job done and this is entirely understandable.

Customers have multiple application products to work with and unlimited work to complete in a limited time frame. Typical end users do not have the time to become expert in any one application product and nor do they have the time to explore all of its capabilities or even to keep completely up to date with an application product as its moves from release to release.

This is a common dilemma for all application software providers. The best they can hope for is a single ‘champion’ within each customer that does his/her best to keep up to date and informed.

The end result of the above reality is that no customer ever manages to get maximum value from its application software. No organization ever gets a full return on its investment. There will always be many things the application software could be configured to handle that would improve productivity, solve burning problems and reduce costs but the knowledge gap prevents this happening.

The only solution I can think of is for the customer to pay the vendor to provide a resident onsite application expert who continually looks for application niches where the software can add value. However, the two flaws in this approach are:

1. Where does the customer find the money?; and
2. Where does the vendor find the people?

Apart from these two minor flaws, it is the perfect solution except for the fact that the application expert would also need to also be an expert in the customer’s business. You have to understand the customer’s business processes before you can determine whether a particular application software product could be a solution. This means that our application consultant needs to be pretty clever and very experienced with bags of initiative and there aren’t a lot of these people around; which brings me back to flaw number 2.

Archimedes was supposed to have said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

I say, “Give me enough smart people and I could automate the world.”

In both cases, we are missing the essential ingredient.

The difficulties don’t mean that we give up, au contraire; they force us to work harder at a solution. The vendor and the customer need to work together to find new ways for the vendor’s product to add value to the customer’s business. This is a mutually beneficial partnership.

Our product RecFind 6 was specifically designed and engineered to be able to handle multiple tasks simultaneously. It was designed from the outset to be a multi-application solution and to enable the customer to use the one piece of application software to solve multiple business problems. To be able to leverage off a single investment and use the one product for multiple business application needs.

We provide the high level tools free of charge with RecFind 6 so the customer can configure multiple solutions (e.g., records management, help desk, asset management, contract management, document management, email management, customer relationship management or CRM) using a single copy of RecFind 6. The tools also allow the customer to ‘partition’ the various applications so each group of users thinks it has its own solution.

However, despite the unique capabilities of RecFind 6, we still have the problem of knowing enough about our customers to be able to propose additional uses for our product. Maybe if all of our customers had their head office in North Sydney our task would be easier but I doubt it. As it is, we have customers all over the world in all time zones and in some very remote locations.

The Internet and Citrix tools like GoToAssist, GoToMeeting and GoToTraining largely solve the distance problems and do so in the most economical way without airfares, expenses and hotel charges. We use these tools extensively and our customers love the convenience and low cost of the solutions we are able to provide thanks to our friends at Citrix. But, there is still no substitute for being onsite and in face to face dialog to best understand a customer’s business processes and needs. It is a case of the old way is still the best way.

Our challenge in these austere times is to convince our customers of the value of our proposition. That is, that an investment in an onsite investigation of needs will always provide bottom line and productivity benefits; that it will more than pay for itself in the short term.

It is early days yet for our model but many of my customers are already using RecFind 6 to solve multiple application software problems. It is always a battle for both of us to find the time and resources for the investigation but it always pays off.

We are continually looking for new ways to simplify and systemise the processes required to determine where we can add value. We don’t have a perfect solution yet but we keep trying because the value proposition is undeniable; do more with less. Buy a single product instead of having to buy ten products. Learn how to use a single product instead of having to learn how to use ten different products. Deal with a single vendor instead of having to deal with ten different vendors. No integration required instead of having to integrate ten different products.

We know we have the right paradigm, now we just need to reach our audience.

This is the question that keeps Microsoft executives awake at night and gnawing at their fingernails.

Will home users, corporates and government agencies rush in to upgrade their desktops to Windows 8? I for one don’t think so and this is why I don’t think so.

The Vista debacle is still fresh in every CIO’s mind and I have not spoken to anyone who is planning to upgrade to Windows 8 in 2012 or even 2013. Most of my customers are still using XP and planning to upgrade to Windows 7.

Microsoft released Vista two years before it was ready and in doing so it inflicted a huge cost and productivity burden on its customers. Those same customers have long memories.

This isn’t a debate about whether Metro is a ‘good’ UI or whether or not Windows 8 should have a start button or whether or not the ARM version should have/will have the option of switching to the classical UI. That particular debate is for the techies and bloggers, not business owners and executives. For serious people this is a debate about value, cost and risk avoidance.

• What is the value proposition of Windows 8? What are the compelling reasons for upgrading to Windows 8? What are the benefits of Windows 8? What effect will Windows 8 have on the bottom line? How will the CIO compose a cohesive business case to convince the board to allocate scarce funds to a Windows 8 rollout?
• What will it cost to purchase Windows 8? What will it cost to upgrade all desktops to Windows 8? What will the cost be of lost productivity as your users grapple with the changes and differences? What will it cost to retrain your users?
• Will the initial Windows 8 experience be a repeat of the Vista experience? What is the risk of this happening? What is the risk of some of your current devices not working with Windows 8? What is the risk of some of your current applications not working with Windows 8? What is the risk that you will have to upgrade or replace some of your PCs? What is the risk that your will have to roll back to Windows 7 from Windows 8 as many customers had to roll back from Vista to XP?

Value Proposition

As a business owner I don’t believe Windows 8 has a compelling value proposition. I don’t see any reason to upgrade from Windows 7. Windows 7 works fine and I will follow the old but wise maxim, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”

Cost

In my business, if I add up all the potential costs including manpower and retraining and lost productivity I come up with a minimum of $1,000 per desktop to upgrade to Windows 8 and that doesn’t include any hardware upgrades that may be required. And this cost assumes that Windows 8 is not a Vista and that all my current devices and application programs (like accounting, CRM and payroll) continue to work fine. The absolute worst case would be $2,000 a desktop if my assumptions are incorrect.

Risk

There is no reason to accept any risk. I will be recommending to my customers that they stick with Windows 7 and wait at least two or three years until Windows 8 has gobbled up a couple of service packs and proven itself.

Maybe Microsoft hasn’t noticed but most of the world is still in recession and every one of my customers, private and government alike, is still trying to cut costs and do more with less. I don’t know where Microsoft thinks the money is coming from to fund a Windows 8 upgrade.

From my perspective as a long-term Microsoft .NET application software developer I have decided not to redevelop my Windows applications for Windows 8 because of the huge amount of retraining, effort and money required to do so. I have been on the Microsoft treadmill for 28 years and have dutifully upgraded, redesigned and redeveloped my applications for each new release of Windows over that time. This time I do not believe the effort and cost is either justified or required. Instead, I am concentrating on converting all my application client functionality to both web clients (to run in a browser) and mobile clients (supporting smartphones and tablets). There will be some inevitable tweaking to do for Windows 8 but for the most part my new RecFind 6 clients won’t care if the user is running Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8, Linux, Apple OS, iOS or Android.

I actually can’t think of any good reason to redevelop for Windows 8 and have to believe that there will be lots of developers like me that will go the web client and mobile client route instead of spending scarce R&D funds and important developer time just to comply with Microsoft’s latest idea of how desktop applications should look and work. I already have enough trouble keeping up with the rapid changes in Android thank you.

It is every software developer’s dream to have just a single set of source code and to support multiple platforms with the same source. Unfortunately, this has never been possible but I still have to manage costs by minimizing the number of code variations I have to support. The advantage of a web client is that it is largely compatible with most operating systems and browsers and I can build and maintain my web client with a single set of source code albeit with a number of “ifs” to cater for variations in browsers and operating systems. I need separate source code for Both Android and iOS for my ‘native mode’ mobile apps so I end up supporting three development environments, browser, Android and iOS. This is fine because my customers are demanding web clients and mobile clients so I know that my investment in these three environments will pay off. No customer has yet asked for a Windows 8 compatible/certified RecFind 6 client but it is early times yet.

My applications (all based on RecFind 6) are in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) sector and are designed for the records management, document management, document imaging and business process management sectors. As such we could best describe RecFind 6 as an information management solution and luckily for us this is an ideal application for the three environments we now support, browsers (web clients), Android and iOS (mobile clients).

My customers are also happy to use my products in these three environments so I have absolutely no compelling reason to redesign and rewrite RecFind 6 for Windows 8. My browser clients will run under Windows XP, 7 and 8 so there is absolutely no need for me to build a ‘native’ Windows 8 RecFind 6 client. Hopefully, my current Windows 7 RecFind 6 client will run with only minor tweaks under the Windows 8 ‘classical’ desktop so that my clients that still want to run my ‘fat’ client can still do so. However, there will be no need to do so because my RecFind 6 web client will be faster and easier to install and maintain.

What if a majority of software developers think like me and Microsoft ends up with a new desktop platform and very few ‘native’ applications, especially designed and written for Windows 8? Customers buy Windows to run applications, to do work. If Windows 8 doesn’t have the applications they need they will not bother with it.

Microsoft has thousands of very, very clever people and a marketing budget I can only dream of so we should never write them off. They proved they can get it very wrong with Vista and they have also proved they can get it very right with Windows 7. Fingers crossed that they again get it very right with Windows 8. But, they are taking a very, very big chance and with most of the western world still in recession they have not chosen an exactly auspicious time to launch Windows 8.

To reiterate, and for all the reasons espoused above, I do not see Windows 8 being the success Microsoft is hoping for.

Many years ago when I was living in the USA I watched in amazement as US car companies in Detroit outsourced car production to Mexico and Canada and laid off thousands of workers. My mind struggled with the logic because surely laid-off workers wouldn’t be able to afford new cars even if they were made cheaper in Mexico?

The trend continued and accelerated over the years and each time I read about more outsourcing and layoffs I wondered, “How do they expect laid-off workers to be able to buy their goods?” “What is the point of reducing costs if at the same time you also reduce the size of your market?”

Have you been to Detroit lately? Have you seen first-hand what outsourcing can do to a city and communities?

The why is easy to answer; senior executives wanted lower costs to make the Wall Street analysts happy and to then earn them much bigger bonuses. Hedge funds and M&A companies wanted lower costs to make doing deals easier and more profitable. A small number of very greedy and avaricious people at the top were more than happy to destroy livelihoods, towns, states and even countries just to get even richer than they already were. This is an example of greed on a scale we have never seen previously. Lives are being destroyed by people with more money that they can ever spend savagely and uncaringly destroying others to become even more obscenely wealthy.

We all know that no developing nation can transition to a developed nation without a large, growing and healthy middle class. Why then are western ‘developed’ nations now destroying the middle class? In the USA the obscenely rich are becoming richer, the middle class is shrinking and the poor class is growing. Is this how we want to continue? Is this a recipe for success for a country or just an incredibly selfish recipe for success for a tiny minority? Why are we letting it happen?

I almost choked when I recently read Apple’s explanation of why it now manufactures everything in China using Foxconn. Basically, they said it wasn’t because of lower costs (rubbish!); it was because the expertise and supply chains were no longer in the USA. Doesn’t Apple realize that the expertise and supply chains are now longer in the USA because USA companies outsourced their IP and laid off the expertise in the USA? Apple originally outsourced because of lower costs and eventually this outsourcing destroyed the ability of the USA to compete. It is a case of cause and effect; the outsourcing came first and this in turn destroyed America’s ability to compete. Now we have a situation where Apple’s competitors are unable to match its manufacturing costs and the only solution for them is to also outsource to Chinese companies like Foxconn thus further eroding the US’s ability to compete. If this trend continues the USA will soon lose the ability to build electronic devices.

Because of outsourcing western countries have lost not only jobs but key skills and manufacturing capabilities that they will never get back. Smarmy western politicians blithely talk about re-training programs to solve the unemployment problem but what is the point of re-training people if there aren’t any jobs? How long before these same idiotic politicians mandate children staying longer in school and making college education compulsory just to make the unemployment figures look better? Worse still, we are borrowing vast sums of money from the same countries we have outsourced to to fund unemployment benefits and retraining programs. How stupid is that? Let’s exacerbate the problem by becoming impossibly indebted to the countries that have already stolen all our jobs and destroyed our economies? Is it just me or are other people struggling to understand the big picture? Why are we letting it happen?

Did you know that Australia no longer produces tyres? We closed the last local tyre producer last year and we now we rely 100% on imports. Surely tyre production is a strategic industry that we can’t afford to lose? More importantly, once that factory is closed and the equipment sold off or scrapped we can’t simply restart this industry. The workers too have gone along with their many years of irreplaceable skills and experience. Production facilities and expertise irreversibly lost. This same thing is happening in all areas of our economy, we are losing the ability to make things and we are losing our self-reliance. We are becoming more and more vulnerable each year and more and more indebted each year. Why are we letting it happen?

In the last 30 years we have seen the largest transfer of wealth and IP the world has ever seen. Western nations have transferred their wealth and their IP to developing nations and become massively indebted in the process. Where is the up side for the vast majority of citizens in western nations? We are we letting a tiny minority of the super-rich destroy our economies and steal our future? Why are we letting it happen?

My main fear is that the outsourcing trend has gone on so long that it is now irreversible; that the problem can’t be fixed. I don’t just worry about my retirement; I worry about the future of my children and grandchildren. What kind of world have we left for them?

I own and run a software company that produces what we call enterprise content management software, a broad term that includes applications like records management, document management, CRM, imaging, contract management, etc. At least once a week I receive some kind of proposal from mainly Indian firms to outsource my development and support functions. I tell them not as long as I own the company.

We do everything in house because that way we produce a far better quality of product and an infinitely higher quality of support. Outsourced development doesn’t work and neither does outsourced support. In my business, outsourcing does not product better quality, it produces rubbish. Outsourcing is never done to improve the product or services or to improve the client interface. It is only ever done by naïve and greedy senior executives to fatten their pay packets at the expense of their employees and long-suffering customers.

Why do you let it happen? Why do you support companies that outsource key functions and lay off Australian workers? Do you enjoy making support calls to Indian and Filipino call centres? Please think about your responsibilities and the future of your children and grandchildren. It may well be too late but I for one will be doing everything in my power to support Australian companies that don’t outsource and to remove my support from Australian companies that do outsource Australian jobs. We need to start taking action or we will not have a future.

Why are you letting it happen?

I was recently speaking to a very senior public servant trying to understand the government’s purchasing policy as we had been locked out of a couple of bids. He explained that it was because they already had 3 ECM providers and that was all they needed regardless of any other factor or consideration. He said he always did things in threes so he had 3 automobile suppliers, 3 computer suppliers, 3 soap suppliers, etc.  He said he believed that as long as you have 3 options you can meet any demand or contingency.

At the time I thought this was pretty stupid; how can you possibly meet any demand with just 3 alternatives? Then the more I thought about it the more I realized that 3 is in fact the magic number.

The number 3 can be used to measure anything and to control and predict anything. Goldilocks rated porridge using the magic number; too cold, too hot and just right. She rated beds the same way; too hard, too soft and just right. Good sales people always give you 3 options and then recommend one, e.g., too complicated for your needs, too simplistic for your needs, just right, the one I recommend. People are either too fat, to thin or just right. A meal is too big, too small or just right and so on and so on ad nauseam.

You could easily get through life with 3 pairs of shoes (well maybe women couldn’t), 3 jackets, 3 pairs of pants, 3 ties, etc. We are supposed to eat 3 meals a days so food is already under the spell of the magic number.

Three is the basis for a whole new philosophy, the ‘Power of Three’. The Catholic Church is already under the spell with the Holy Trinity and most governments in the world have 3 tiers with a President a Lower House and an Upper House. We also know by experience that 3 wheel  bikes, trikes and scooters are far more a stable than their 2 wheel counterparts and that a 3 way bet is the safest bet of all. Just about anything we can think about is better in multiples of 3.

I now realise that my aforementioned public servant is actually a philosopher and a prophet and far wiser than I had initially thought. What he should really do next is start a religion based on the magical properties of the number 3. I for one would certainly line up in the rain to join (hell, I would even crawl over barbed wire in the snow to join). We should call the new religion the ‘Power Of Three’ or POT for short as in pot the smoking substance or stemmed to ‘potty’ as in of unsound mind or the plastic contrivance toddlers use until they can graduate to the toilet proper. POT would attract people from all walks of life and of all persuasions because of its universal nature. That is, the number 3 controls all of our lives.

The priests of our new religion will be able to confidently predict anything and will be renowned for their unnerving accuracy.  The stock market will rise, fall or maintain the status quo. A cricket match will be either won, lost or drawn. A horse race will always have horses in the first, second and third positions. A patient’s condition will improve, worsen or not change. A new born child will grow up to be tall, short or of average height. That same child will be fat, thin or of average weight and at school will be academically above average, below average or average.

There is no better way to look at the world than through the number 3. We can manage our lives and responsibilities using this magic number. In fact, I see no reason to teach children to count beyond the number 3 because everything we need to do and have to do in life can be governed by the number 3. If we got rid of all numbers above 3 then we could have our kids out of school years earlier and into the workforce where we really need them. We could solve the unemployment problem with a resurgence of old-fashioned jobs like chimney sweeps and pit pony boys for the coal mines. We could drastically reduce the size of government by only allowing 3 political parties and 3 seats for each party. There would only be 3 government departments and they would only be allowed 3 employees each.

Once we have implemented our 3 policy we could sell off Parliament House in Canberra and lease out hundreds of government buildings because the government wouldn’t need them anymore. We could drastically cut costs in the same parliament by only allowing 3 phone calls a day and 3 choices at the canteen and by not allowing any politician to live greater than 3 kilometres from his office or be chauffeured more than 3 kilometres a day. Additionally politicians and bureaucrats would only be allowed 3 flights a year and no politician or bureaucrat would be allowed to stay in office longer than 3 years (then they would have to get a real job and suffer like the rest of us).

Of course if politicians and bureaucrats knew they had to get a real job in 3 years they wouldn’t pass the stupid legislation they now do. At the moment they can pass all kinds of draconian laws and taxes because they are not affected by them; they are protected with job security, guaranteed pensions and the like. If they knew they would shortly have to live and work in the real world they would be much more circumspect about the laws they promoted.

The Power Of Three (POT) is starting to sound like a truly wonderful idea. For example, there would only be 3 governments in Australia, not the 8 we currently have and tens of thousands less politicians and public servants to draft silly legislation and screw up our lives. We would pay 3 percent tax instead of 45 percent and we would only have to fill in a tax return every 3 years.

With all the ex-public servants and politicians now in the workforce we will have to get used to job sharing so we will all have 3 months’ vacation a year to make room for our new recruits.

The number three will become the guiding economic principle for Australia. We will only trade with 3 countries, we will only allow 3 manufacturers in any sector so 3 car manufacturers, 3 ice cream manufacturers, 3 fast food restaurant chains, 3 road makers, 3 accountancy firms, 3 law firms (that will be basis for a few lawyer jokes), 3 banks, 3 brokerage houses, 3 coal mines, 3 iron ore mines, 3 bread makers, 3 butchers, 3 types of ice cream, 3 types of cheese, etc.

No one will complain about a lack of choice because as my senior public servant said “With 3 suppliers you can meet any demand or contingency.” Little did he know that my initial disappointment would soon turn into inspiration and the stimulus to create a new world religion, the Power Of Three.

I am now working on my next publication, “The thoughts of Chairman Frank on the Power Of Three.”  When that is finished I will begin working on the first testament of my new bible and it will start with “In the beginning, Frank spoke to the great God public servant and was given the magic number…”

I can’t wait for the TV show when  I can proudly stand on stage in a shimmering silver suit, wig and makeup and implore you to send money so I can air-condition my dog’s kennel (I had better make that 3 dog’s kennels). The possibilities are endless, long live the Power Of Three.

We have all suffered and suffered from network issues and outages and failing servers. One reason is the unparalleled complexity of Microsoft server-based networks and the other is the very low availability of really talented, knowledgeable and capable server and network specialists. The core problem is complexity; if the environment wasn’t so incredibly difficult to setup and debug we wouldn’t require so many really clever people.

Even large enterprises, presumably with all the resources they need, are not immune. We have all seen and suffered from major outages at banks and airlines in 2011. If the big guys with all the money and resources can’t keep their networks up and running what chance do the rest of us have?

If it seems too complex it is too complex.

The level of complexity now bedevilling most of us has slowly crept into our business and home systems since the early days of networks and servers starting around 1980. Whereas there were some weird and hard to configure networks in the early days the offerings thinned out as the market made up its mind about standards and we were eventually left with mainly Microsoft-driven networks from about  1990 onwards. These same Microsoft Windows driven networks have gotten a little more complex year on year until they are now almost unmanageable by ‘ordinary’ IT personnel.

As always the industry counters by proposing more and more training and certification. In other words, let’s not solve the complexity problem let’s instead address the symptoms of complexity by throwing more money and time at it. All the while the problem is getting worse and there are fewer and fewer people who really understand it. We don’t have a skills shortage; we have an overly complex environment to manage.

There is another serious problem and that is security. The Internet has exposed more evil and people of ill purpose that ever existed in Sodom and Gomorrah. These evil people are able to penetrate our networks because the networks are too complex. Windows is too complex, way more complex than it needs to be. Every time we plug a hole we open two more because of the complexity of Windows. Battling evil is a never ending task and a losing battle because we cannot win using the current tools we have. In my opinion, there is no way we can ever make our current IT environments, and even our home computers, really secure and immune from attack.

If you want evidence that what I say is correct just look at the massive security industry that has built up around Windows. There are multiple billion dollar companies like Symantec that only exist because Windows is insecure and will always be insecure. IT security is a multi-billion dollars industry because Windows is rubbish.

I liken Windows to the tax system. The tax system has been played with and modified thousands of times over many, many years until it is now so complex that no one understands it and you need to go to court to get a judgement. The advice of a trained tax accountant isn’t enough to ensure compliance. Even the tax office can’t rely on its own advice and nor can you. The current tax legislation is not fixable; we need to start afresh and produce something new and simple replacing tens of thousands of pages with 50 or 60 pages. The tax system and Windows suffer from the same problem, the more you try to fix it the more complex it becomes and the more fragile it becomes.  To use the common vernacular, “there are holes in the tax system and Windows you can drive a truck through.”

If it was up to me I would replace our current tax system with a simple flat tax system (say 17% on gross income) and do away with tens of thousands of pages of tax legislation, deductions, exemptions and rulings. It would take five minutes to do your tax return and it would not require a tax accountant and thousands of dollars in fees. (Of course this won’t happen because tens of thousands of accountants and public servants rely on the tax system being complex otherwise there would be no need for their services.)

I would like to do the same thing with Windows. It too can’t be fixed and it needs to be replaced with something far, far simpler. My educated guess is that the crooks and the Windows security industry won’t like this proposal either; both have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. We are in the ridiculous situation the opposing parties both benefit from the system not being fixed. Is it only me that thinks this is crazy? How did we let it happen?

When I go home at night I don’t switch on my Windows PC anymore; I just turn on my iPad. It is quicker, easier to use, infinitely more secure and it provides access to all of the information I require. I do have to switch on my Windows PC at least once a month to download all the updates and use up large chunks of my broadband GB allowance. This process also wastes many hours of my time for no discernible benefit other than to ‘protect’ me against the latest round of attacks from the army of crooks on the Internet.

Multiply the time I spend keeping my PC up-to-date to avoid the crooks by the hundreds of millions of Windows users around the world and you have the largest single productivity black hole the world has ever seen (and the largest chunk of unpaid work). Now add all the time government agencies and corporations spend keeping Windows up to date and battling the crooks and you have enough wasted time to probably double the world’s GDP output. Again, is it just me that thinks this is a stupidly ridiculous situation and a massive waste of manpower?

I have over twenty years’ experience programming, supporting and managing mainframes so I have a little knowledge of this genre of computers. Most people think mainframes are dead but I assure you they aren’t. There are still mainframes out there and they are still doing what they have always done, quietly, efficiently and securely processing huge numbers of transactions and rarely failing. The following Wikipedia link provides a good introduction to modern mainframe computers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_computer

I think we need to reconsider the path we have taken with both network servers (and clusters) and home PCs. We need to move away from Windows before it starts consuming 25 hours out of every 24.

Microsoft isn’t going to fix Windows, it is going to ‘improve it’ with even more features and functions and complexity, just as it has done year after year. Microsoft is not listening to its consumers. We want less complexity and greater ease of use that’s why we all rushed out and bought iPads, millions and millions of them.

We need servers like mainframes, built to do a specific job and brilliant in doing that specific job. Similarly, we need something a hundred times simpler and less complex and easier to use than Windows for our PCs. It is time for a fundamental and seismic change in how we access and process information. We have followed the Microsoft pied piper for way too long and it is time to wake up and follow a different leader and move to a different model.

Long live the mainframe and the iPad, they could be our salvation.

This article is designed to be used as a guideline by the records manager or business owner when considering having paper records digitized; that is, scanned to create digital images of the original paperwork. It includes most of the things you need to think about and allow for and it should help you when formulating budgets and negotiating with vendors.

Overview

The safest approach is an end-to-end one where the vendor handles everything and takes responsibility for the final product. That is, starting with the paper documents and doing all the preparation work involved to make your paper ‘scannable’, capturing all contextual Metadata and the attachment/linking of same to the scanned images. It should also include the design and configuration of the best way to index and organize the images (and Metadata) in the final product (e.g., your electronic document and records management system – EDRMS). There is little point in digitizing a mass of paper if the results are not easily and conveniently searchable using your preferred terminology or Taxonomy.

For peace of mind you really want the vendor to handle everything required including the importing of all scanned images and Metadata into your EDRMS so you end up with a working and ready-to-use solution.

The cost is always an issue and no one in my experience ever really means it when they say, “We have to have this at any cost.” There will always be pressure from someone (usually the resident bean counter) for you to take on some of the workload yourself to help lower the costs. I caution against this because it absolves the vendor of some of the responsibility for the final product and additionally, I have to assume that you and your staff are already busy in your usual day jobs and that taking on extra work isn’t always possible.

The usual processes involved are:

Data inspection

The vendor will want to analyze the data to be scanned and determine what preparation is required. The vendor will double check your estimated volumes and make recommendations based on the characteristics and properties of the data to be scanned. Most vendors (that is all reputable vendors) will be reluctant to provide you with a fixed price quotation until after the data inspection is completed. An example, based on local government Development Applications, of the things what will be discovered in a data inspection follows:

• There is a need to back-capture Development Applications (DA);
• That each DA is stored in a file folder;
• That there are 8,000 DA file folders, each containing on average 130 sheets of letter paper – totalling 1,040,000 sheets of paper;
• That each DA file folder contains seven different document types;
• That the images are required to be indexed via the file folder number & document type (i.e. each file folder has to be scanned and indexed into 7 multi-page images – one for each document type);
• That most pages are single sided but some are duplex (double-sided); and
• That documents are generally not stapled (approximately 11% are stapled) and don’t require repair (5% do require repair).

Data Preparation

This normally involves removing pages from a cardboard file folder, removing staples, smoothing paper, orienting paper, etc. The objective should be to organize the pages into documents and batches to facilitate faster scanning using automatic document feed scanners. The most important component of any scanning quote is the time estimate (duration) and data preparation time is a key component of this.

Data preparation costs are sometimes called ‘handling’ costs. You want a fixed cost quote from the vendor for handling costs, that is, the vendor takes the responsibility and risk, not you. The responsible vendor will do random sampling during the data inspection step to better understand the handling costs involved in your job.

Scanning

This is where all paper is captured as TIFF images and multi-page documents are captured as multi-page TIFF images. At this stage the vendor may offer to optionally convert all or some of the TIFF images to text via an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) process. Note that this is usually an option; do not assume your digitized pages will be searchable because TIFF images are not full-text searchable. There is an additional step required for images to be full-text searchable.

If full text indexing is a requirement then make sure it is specified in your requirements document and included in the vendor’s quote. Note that if you do mandate full text indexing that the final format of the digitized image won’t be TIFF, it will probably be PDF or even better, PDF/A (an internationally recognized standard).

The time to scan each sheet paper depends upon a few key factors like the quality of the original source document, whether it is single or double sided and its condition, i.e., wrinkled, folded, torn, stapled, etc. Expect a much higher cost when the quality of the source documents is poor.

OCRing the scanned images to create full-text searchable electronic documents

Whether or not this line item appears in your quote really depends on how the vendor handles it. Note that it does lengthen the time taken to process any page, in some cases easily doubling it or worse.

However, it is also usually an automated ‘background’, asynchronous process that consumes computer time and not much person time. It may double the time required to complete your job but it should not double the costs.

Verification – Scanning

This is where the vendor applies quality assurance processes to ensure that all pages have been properly scanned. This means the vendor should be able to confirm that all pages have been scanned at the agreed quality standard. Some form of quality control is mandatory in any scanning job and you need to ensure that you have specified quality control in your specification and that it is included as part of the vendor’s quote.

Capture

This is where the vendor imports the digitized images into your EDRMS and creates all the links and Metadata necessary for efficient and appropriate searching. As mentioned previously, there is no point in having a huge database of scanned images if it is not searchable in a manner appropriate to each organization’s business processes.

Verification – Capture

This is where the vendor sanity checks the capture process and confirms that all pages have been scanned and captured/exported into your EDRMS as per specification. If you begin with 100,000 paper pages then you should end up 100,000 scanned, indexed and readable images of pages in your EDRMS; this sounds simple but it often is not so. Please think about the metrics required to ensure this level of quality control; you can’t afford to lose information.

Final inspection and sign-Off

This is where you inspect the final product and approve the job for payment. Please make sure that inspection and sign-off acceptance steps are part of the requirement specification. When doing so, ask the vendor to provide signed copies of its verification paperwork and also have your staff do random sampling to confirm that nothing has gone awry. This is IT so things will go wrong.

Costs, specify quote format

To ensure you are comparing apples to apples you need to detail how you want the costs expressed in your requirements document. For example, what will be the travel, expenses or transport costs? I would always suggest that you give the vendor a standard cost schedule to complete with its response to ensure uniformity.

You can either specify the breakdown of costs (see example below) or just ask for a fixed price per scanned page. Please don’t ask for a fixed price per document (I have seen this many times) because the vendor will then have to assume an average number of pages per document and this will lead to significant variations in the quotes. Obviously a ‘document ‘ can be from 1 to several hundred pages so it is not a standard unit of measurement.

Even when asking for a quote per ‘page’ you need to specify whether your ‘page’ is single or double-sided because a double-side page takes at least twice as long to scan as a single-sided page.

Please also be aware of the issues of handling blank pages; you do not want to be charged for scanning blank pages. Most modern multi-feed scanners have a feature to ignore blank pages. This is especially important if your pages are a mix of single and double-sided.

Contents of the quote

If you ask for a detailed breakdown, the vendor should detail all of the professional services and costs required including solution design, project setup, paper handling, scanning, capture, transport costs (if the job is being done offsite), etc.

If you ask for a simple fixed price per page the vendor will bundle all costs into a single figure such as a flat cost per page, e.g., 12 cents. If this is the case you need to ensure that there are no exclusions, that is, no possible additional costs not included in the quote.

The following is a sample generic quote listing all components of the quote. In real life you are unlikely to get all of these lines items unless you specifically ask for them.

Data Inspection

$150 per hour for 4 hours = $600

Data Preparation

$40 per hour for 120 hours = $4,800

Scanning

$40 per hour for 200 hours = $8,000

Capture

$150 per hour for 4 hours = $600

Verification

$150 per hour for 20 hours = $3,000

Delivery and Installation

$150 per hour for 4 hours = $600

Standard costs per page scanned

If you specify a single fixed price per scanned page the quote will look like the following:

“Standard simplex, 200 dpi black and white, OCR creating TIFF/PDF = $0.13 per image”

Other Considerations

The main consideration is whether the work will be done on your premises or at the vendor’s site. In most cases, because of the volumes of paper involved and the danger of lost data if data is shipped back and forth, it is preferable to do the actual scanning at your premises. However, when this is not possible, the vendor will provide an alternative site but additional costs may apply (e.g., transport costs, office rental, etc.).

This is a little article I wrote in 2003. I am republishing it today because it is still true, maybe even more so, and because it predicted that a replacement for email would shortly be upon us. That replacement is of course already taking over from email in our personal lives if not yet in our business lives. The replacement is of course two technologies, SMS and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

                                                                                                                                      

Today, many of us meet our partners on the Internet and profess our undying love and devotion via email.

The email, or “courriel” as the French now insist on calling it to stem incursion of English words into the French lexicon, is a wondrous and multifaceted thing. How blithely we regard it with no thought to the stupendous expansion of human-to-human communications it has facilitated within just one generation.

This now ubiquitous means of communication and expression would have been unthinkable to our parents or grandparents who struggled to compose two or three letters a year to distant relatives and friends and waited patiently for months, sometimes years for the ‘turnaround’ necessitated by steamships and railways and taciturn postal workers stoically slogging through the snow on foot.

With electronic communications traveling at the speed of light (or sometimes marginally slower if an older, lesser megahertz, aging and weary server blocks its path and slows its forward motion) we can conduct almost instant conversations with associates in distant climes with nary a thought to the wonder of it all.

Emails now easily comprise eighty percent or more of all business and personal communications. It would be a much higher proportion had not lawyers (the last bastion of all the paper supremacists); all over the world resisted the trend by insisting on non-standard paper lengths, unintelligible language and billing weight of paper. Would it be they discovered “Tools/Word Count” on the Word toolbar they could have abandoned this ancient form of revenue generation and made far more money be learning how to “cut and paste” and write voluminous, equally incomprehensible emails; charging by the word.

Have any of us really had time to think about the wonder of it all? Probably not, because the email revolution has snuck up on society slowly and inexorably over the last thirty years until it now permeates every facet of our business and personal lives. When I was young we met young ladies at church and dances, school, college and work. Today we meet our partners on the Internet and profess our undying love and devotion via email.

This new paradigm in human relationships came too late for me to enjoy but it would have been greatly appreciated in my youth. It is extraordinary difficult to mislead someone over your height, appearance or other facial or bodily characteristics when asking for a dance, rejection was my greatest fear and embarrassment as a young man competing for a partner. Via email we can be whatever we wish to be either innocently or fraudulently and all us men with “great faces for radio” can do far better than we could in the ‘olden-days’; at least until that fateful day when we and our true-love finally meet. Hopefully, ‘she’ has been as creative with the truth as we have so there is no great discrepancy in the ‘hope-versus-reality’ aspirations of both parties.

How would email have changed our past had it been available? How will email and its successors change our future? Will the human race retreat into a world of electronic communications eschewing face-to-face contact in an effort to avoid contagion from SARS, AIDS, Mormon missionaries, born-again-Christians, the homeless and relatives in need of money and advice about which computer to buy? Will the increase in communications further the advance of the human race or will the diminishing amount of human contact retard our development?

What will be the next big advance after email? Will we all have brain implants within 30 years and then communicate by direct thought as easily as we think of a distant friend or relative? Don’t laugh or discard this idea too quickly. I think back to my coal miner dad in 1952 in austere post-war Britain and try to imagine how he could have conceived something so extraordinary and far-reaching and revolutionary as email.

What’s next? Whatever it is you can be sure of two things. Someone has already thought of it and someone else has already begun designing the embryonic technology that will support the mind-mail system of the future. In laboratories around the world the next phase in human-to-human communications is already under development and it too will sneak up on us just as its predecessor did. The successor to email is out there; the majority of us just aren’t aware of it yet.

For years those of us with computer rooms and racks of servers and switches have struggled to keep everything up to date and running. The complexities inherent in what should be a simple task are often huge road blocks to progress. For those who haven’t had to suffer I recommend upgrading from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007.

In today’s overly complex IT world even experts have to call in experts and I have not met anyone who is on top of every issue. I have a saying, “if it feels too complex and looks too complex then it is too complex.”  Somewhere down the track we have taken a wrong turn. We have continued on a path that is getting steeper and steeper and eventually we will have to stop and say, “What am I doing here?” Just understanding and managing the multiple layers of security is a mind-bogglingly difficult task made even more incomprehensible with all the rapid fire service packs and upgrades that only seem to make the problem more and more complex.

The task of managing a company’s IT resources is just way too hard. It is at least ten times harder than it should be and needs to be. It also costs way more money than it should. It is a major restriction on progress and mobility. “We can’t do that because we would have to upgrade the network.” “We can’t move to a new, lower cost office because the cost of downtime and moving the computer room make it just too hard and too expensive.”

Is it just me or do other CEOs find it outright annoying that the part of our company that is just supposed to provide IT services is now dictating what we can do or not do? How did we let this happen? Why is the tail now wagging the dog?

I think we now have a viable solution with the availability of proven technologies in data centres and virtualisation. You can sell your servers and rent servers at the data centre or you can rent rack space at a data centre and move your servers. Even better, you can move to a new generation of virtualised servers and ‘thin’ desktops supported by new generations of software from organisations like VMware and ‘cut-over’ your company’s IT infrastructure from in-house compute room to off-site managed facilities and services to minimize risk and downtime.

For a fully transportable and mobile solution I would also move from my in house PABX to a new generation VoIP phone system. It would also be smart to replace in-house desktops with the new generation of ‘thin’ desktops that can be centrally managed far easier than traditional ‘fat’ desktop computers like the Dell OptiPlex range.

You will still need a way to connect to the data centre so you will have at least one broadband connection to your office and a switch or wireless network to support your staff. But this is a fraction of what you require with an in-house IT system and computer room. For example, you don’t need expensive air-conditioning and fire systems and very expensive redundant power supplies. Depending upon the topology of your offices you may get away with wireless or you may need to cable but again at a fraction of the cost of equipping and managing a fully-fledged computer room.

What about disaster recovery? What about the critical requirement to keep running your business even if your building burns down? A note to IT managers, “backups are not a disaster recovery plan.” Every CEO has to ask the question, “How would we run our business if the building burns down?”

If you have moved all your servers to a professional and certified data centre, virtualised your desktops and moved to a VoIP phone system then you can continue to run your business even if your building burns down. Your staff can connect securely via your VPN from their home networks or even from Starbucks. You could also have equipped all key staff with broadband modems for just such an emergency so all they have to do is plug the modem into the USB port of their home computer or laptop and connect.

I am excited about the possibilities of this approach because like many CEOs I am tired of having to solve the ongoing problems of an in-house IT setup. I am tired of my in-house IT dictating what I can do and not do. I am tired of the tail wagging the dog. I am ready to change and I have already begun speaking to my friends at Dell about virtualising my whole IT operation in 2012.

What’s next? Well, once I have virtualised, moved my IT resources off-site and switched to the latest VoIP phone system  I can probably do away with a great deal of the office space I now occupy. There is no reason that most of the work my staff do couldn’t be done from home. I can rent meeting rooms and training rooms when I need them and maybe even maintain a small serviced office for my sales force in the city. Managers and their staff can meet once a week in a serviced office and we can communicate ‘visually’ using Skype or Facetime or any number of similar services. It just takes some thought and a little reorganization and some new policies and procedures but it is eminently doable.

Yes there is a cost of moving to the new virtualised environment but there are also significant cost savings to offset those costs. I am working on a plan and budget at the moment and I will let you all know how it works out in a future blog. We will get there in 2012 and I am looking forward to an interesting journey.

This is my idea of the ideal gift but to be honest I am not sure if it exists or even if anyone is planning to manufacture it. If the answer is in the negative then hello Apple and Samsung, put down your swords and shields (lawyers to the rest of us) and start spending those wasted hundreds of millions of legal dollars on something useful you can actually sell.

Frank’s law of the perfect mobile device says it must:

1. Be light, weight no more than a pound or 0.5 kilograms. It should be like a really big oversize watch or maybe, next generation iPhone (come on Apple, where is the iPhone 5?);
2. Be really cool to look at;
3. Feel great in the hand;
4. Be really easy to use;
5. Be able to connect via 3G, 4G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and whatever comes next;
6. Have a minimum 24 hour constant use batter life;
7. Accept verbal commands;
8. Have great quality sound;
9. Have no more than 3 buttons (have a look at the Apple TV controller for the best example of design excellence, simplicity to the point of elegance – the perfect combination of form and function);
10. Have a USB 2.0/3.0 port (Apple, why don’t we have this now?);
11. Have a micro card slot (Apple again, please listen to us users);
12. Attach to my person in way that makes it hard to lose (i.e., like a wristwatch or pocket watch on a chain or lanyard);
13. Support soft and external keyboards;
14. Have a touch screen;
15. Provide variable form factors, probably by projection of both screen and keyboard – Microsoft demonstrated this functionality a couple of years ago and then seemed to lose interest;
16. Have the ability to connect to external monitors and TVs;
17. Have a generous solid state hard drive, minimum 128GB;
18. Have an accessible file system (are you listening Apple? How about this for the iPad?);
19. Have a native email client (are you listening HP?);
20. Have a fully Flash/HTML 5 compatible web browser that isn’t limited and crippled (this is for Apple again);
21. Have a fully functional but easy to use and non-complex operating system (iOS is fine but so is WebOS – I am not so keen on Android);
22. Cost no more than $500 for a 128GB version;
23. Work as a telephone and accept SIM cards (this is for HP – tell me again why the Playbook isn’t selling unless you slash the price?);
24. Have a 10Mb camera or better;
25. Have a processor powerful enough to support my workload; and
26. Have enough memory to support my workload, say a minimum of 4GB

This is the ideal device because it replaces all the mobile devices I currently carry around. That is, notebook, Smartphone and tablet. It obviously must also have the functionality within the operating system to perform all the tasks I need to do and would normally do on my 3 current devices.

I will be able to carry it in my pocket or wear it on my wrist or even wear it like a fob or pocket watch on a classy gold chain. Maybe waistcoats will come back into fashion.

Innovative organizations will jump on the bandwagon and design cool accessories for it like a projection screen in a pen that you can unfurl and stand on your desk and hang on the back of the airplane seat. They will also design roll up keyboards in a pen that connect via Bluetooth and that sit flat once you unfurl them using advanced fabric memory functionality.

It actually isn’t hard to design our ideal device because all you have to do is think about all the frustrating missing features of your current devices; all the functionality you would like and need that isn’t there yet. This is why we all carry multiple mobile devices; because none of them do all the things we need them to do.

The vendors cannot tell us that they don’t have the design talent or technology because they patently do. They can’t tell us they can’t afford to build my ideal device because right now Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft are spending billions of dollars on lawyers for stupid, non-productive legal cases over simply absurd patent disputes. They are trying to earn their income from lawsuits in lieu of product sales.

Here is my message to the vendors, “give us the products we want and need and you won’t have to worry about profits, you will be swimming in money like that Disney character Scrooge McDuck.”

So Apple, HP, Samsung and others, where is my Xmas present?