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The need for information management extends beyond the realm of customer service.
Business process re-engineering is the buzzword of today. It really means looking at
the core activity of a business and asking: “What are we trying to do and is there
any way we could do it better, quicker and more cost-effectively?”
This means looking at the management of the business itself. If the medium used
to store essential information is paper, today’s management will have been structured
to manage within the constraints imposed by paper, rather than to optimize the
way it does business. The personnel deployed will have been chosen for their skills in
working with paper files, opening and routing large volumes of correspondence,
answering customer letters and duplicating and distributing paper-based information.
Managers will have been chosen not just for their expertise in the core activities
of the business, but also for their skill in controlling these paper workers
and getting maximum productivity out of them. These personnel management
and administration functions actually reduce the productivity of management
staff in core activities.
The first step to make any significant improvement is to replace the paper documents
with a document image. The new techniques of information management then
available are referred to as document image processing or DIP.
There are three media that can be used to store documents in image form
—
magnetic
media, optical disk and microfilm. The first two hold the image in digital form
after passing the document through a scanner (very similar to a fax machine). The
digitized image is not human-readable. It requires a device to turn the digital
information back into human-readable form. The microfilm is human-readable
as it is just a tiny photograph of the original document.
In India not only do we need to provide DIP solutions to the insurance and
banking sectors, we also need to enhance the use of IT in these segments. This will
not only help increase the productivity levels in this sector, it will also give the
desired push and exposure to the skill set of software engineers working in the
Indian market.
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