In our industry, there are very few visionaries. Karl Schumacher, president, Pitney Bowes docSense, is one of those rarities, a man with a vision of document processing technology and a company to back it up. Schumacher's expertise grew from positions in product development and marketing as well as strategic planning. He has a passion for our industry, an understanding of its evolution and a vision of the possibilities. Document Processing Technology spoke with him about his mission to "create raving fans" of the docSense product line and his view of the industry.
DPT: Where does your organization rank docSense's technology in relation to others in the industry?
Schumacher: Pitney Bowes is a significant investor in R&D. Our expertise includes encryption, Java/J2EE and secure transfer environments as well as a wide range of print and mail engineering technologies. We are among the top 200 companies in patent ownership. This is a result of developing our knowledge internally as well as making some important strategic acquisitions including StreamWeaver and, most recently, Alysis Technologies.
DPT: What did Alysis bring Pitney Bowes and docSense?
Schumacher: Alysis gave docSense the WorkOut server the lynchpin of @Work's product offering. We took Jim Flynn's WorkOut server, integrated some modular offerings of our own to create Digital Document Delivery (D3) and never looked back. This is similar to the way we approached our acquisition of the StreamWeaver print engineering software.
DPT: Why is that technology important to you?
Schumacher: We look at documents as a customer-focused process. Our mission is to create customer and shareholder value through the creation of efficient and effective documents in hard copy and digital forms. Many e-commerce initiatives grew up from great ideas to let the customer interact digitally with their documents but didn't connect to the reality of hard copy. To make that happen, you have to create capabilities and deploy technology that is independent of the output medium. That is the basis for the docSense vision. Above all, it is critical to take a holistic approach and tie the document in its various manifestations to the business processes.
DPT: What are the challenges of selling the vision of a strategic document approach?
Schumacher: We constantly have to re-educate our staff about the possibilities and variations in every step of the document process. Our people need to communicate the strategic value of the process to the customer. At the same time that we have been building the docSense brand, we have been challenged to meet our corporate requirement to implement those solutions internally.
DPT: What does the future hold?
Schumacher: The document output industry moves slowly. There will not be a cataclysmic change but a relentlessly changing view of the document process. The document process will get to where there is true data independence from the document medium based on flexible document repositories built from both legacy output and raw data. From there, they will be able to drive documents, summaries and teasers using flexible document composition tools to a multiplicity of outputs more seamlessly than possible today. My prediction is that companies will offer customer delivery preference files, enabling customers to control the presentation, the content and the channel of the information they see. It's a hard trip to make, but it's the trip of a lifetime.
Pat McGrew is the co-author of "Wrestling Legacy Data to the Web" and a frequent contributor to "Document Processing Technology." For more information or to contact Pat, visit www.mcgrewmcdaniel.com.
