Foreword

The world of business has the word Digital on its lips like never before. Sure, there have been digital assistants, digital shopping, and digital marketing before, but now, digital is about something more profound. Digital is about businesses transcending an old way of doing business that has been stuck in paper, manual processes, and physical artifacts. Digital is about redesigning your business and the way you work to gain competitive advantages, greater efficiencies, and new sources of revenue.

The four forces of modern technology—the cloud, mobile, social, and big data—have changed the expectations of customers and employees. They cannot expect to do business the same old way. Those who embrace these new forces can totally disrupt entire industries, such as music, media, transportation, and even hotels. Those who do not adapt to these forces go the way of the dodo faster than they can possibly imagine. However, just because you have an established company in the established industry, it doesn't mean that you cannot reinvent yourself if you embrace these forces.

To create a digital business, you must digitize your business processes and information and take full advantage of the speed this information can provide. You can be giving that information to your customers on demand through their mobile devices when they want it. You can be cutting out inefficient paper handling and manual handling to save time and money. You can be freeing up resources such as people, real estate, and manufacturing capacity to create new products and services and add real value for your customers.

Capture is an important step toward moving from a physical world of information handling and manual processes toward a digital world of straight-through processes and customer delight. It can transform expensive urban warehouses full of cabinets of paper into productive, vibrant places of creative energy and collaboration. However, capture is not just scanning a bunch of paper and turning it into the digital equivalent of filing cabinets. Intelligent capture is about extracting information from that paper, discerning meanings, and initiating digital processes to succeed the manual handling it replaces.

Alfresco has worked with Ephesoft for several years to successfully digitize processes in many industries and many companies, big and small. Through open source collaboration and open standards interoperability, Alfresco and Ephesoft have worked hand-in-hand to transform how companies handle contracts, mortgages, insurance claims, accounts payable, and accounts receivable.

The solution provided by Ephesoft with Intelligent Capture, Mobile Capture, Automatic Classification, and the Alfresco with Enterprise Content Management system and its Activiti Business Process Engine simplifies the conversion of these processes into digital business processes. Our joint use of open source also means that these solutions are affordable and that our systems evolve at the speed of community innovation. Proprietary solutions have not done justice to what can be accomplished by truly smart software that embraces the digital world and moves information efficiently and effectively to the delight of your customers and employees.

By picking up this book, I hope that you can realize the benefits of transforming your business process for a new digital era. You can go beyond yesterday's capture solutions of proprietary vendors to a rapid evolution toward a digital future with open source solutions, embracing today's technology forces.

John Newton

Founder and CTO, Alfresco Software