AIIM 2004 Preview: You Will Comply

When Tom Hanks played the coach of a women's professional baseball team in A League of Their Own (not on my personal list of classics, by the way), he confronted one particularly sensitive (and sobbing) player and uttered the memorable complaint, "There's no crying in baseball!" Delivered in a high-pitched, annoyed whine, the line failed to maintain the cultural shelf life of such tough-talkin' quotable quotes as Clint's "Go ahead, make my day" or Arnold's "I'll be back." Nevertheless, shift the playing field to the arena of records management, and the line resonates with one of the core themes of AIIM Expo 2004, coming up March 8-10 at the Javits Convention Center in New York: "There's no crying in compliance!" Whether the driving force in your organization is HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley or the Corporate and Criminal Fraud Accountability Act or any of a number of other mandates, the mantra is clear: "No more whining. This won't go away. And, you know that. So, buck up, learn, and strategize." A dozen AIIM Expo sessions fall under the category "Electronic Records Management and Legal & Regulatory Compliance." Another of AIIM's common session categories — storage — picks up the compliance theme in this year's category heading: "Storage and Preservation." The presence of compliance expert Randolph Kahn, Esq., as a keynote speaker and session leader underscores AIIM's commitment to addressing your organization's "need to know" imperatives when it comes to dealing with compliance management.

The sessions under another AIIM 2004 category heading, "Business Process Management and Workflow," will help to connect document and content management issues, many of them compliance-related, to the broader picture of organizational structure and goals. In particular, these sessions will address an often overlooked aspect of a document and content management rollout — the integration of document and content management systems with other enterprise applications and operations. And, not all of those apps and operations are document-centric. That is, the actual processing, archiving, and/or accessing of documents may not be the core feature of a particular business process even though document flow may help to facilitate the process. How will your organization accommodate, within the same management structure, both document-centric processes and those in which documents play only peripheral roles? The AIIM 2004 BPM (business process management) and workflow sessions should help you to avoid potential disconnections.

Although these weighty compliance- and process-related sessions will certainly grab your attention, don't leave the show without checking out the current state of traditional capture technologies. Based on sneak previews I've received from various scanning hardware vendors, as well as imaging software vendors, I'm anticipating some jaw-dropping product rollouts on the exhibit floor. I can't tell you which horse to lay your money on for the seventh race, but I am willing to whisper this tip: forms processing. If you haven't been to a forms recognition demo lately, you'll be impressed by the evolution of technologies for capturing and reading unstructured forms. After all, you'll struggle with compliance if your front end capture is shaky.

So, I encourage you to make your way to New York for the AIIM show and invite you to visit us at the Doc Management Online booth. And, I'll venture to make one final prediction about your trip to AIIM. If you find yourself impatiently waiting in line at the taxi stand outside Javits, I'm sure one recent movie catchphrase will be running through your mind: "Dude, where's my car?"

By Tom von Gunden, chief editor, Doc Management Online, Content Mgt Online, and IT Storage Online