Document Processing Services: Trends to Watch
My view is that the document processing business is very healthy. The large BPO providers that increasingly provide document services as part of their business process stack will never obtain the focus or competency of companies that provide output management, enterprise content services, and managed office solutions.
Why? There are just too many specific challenges such as re-tooling document production to make customer communications more relevant. On the office side, we need to link MFPs to core business processes and manage these assets more cleanly and efficiently. In the area of enterprise content services, there is a growing need to get more information value from the exploding amount of unstructured content to feed business processes, data warehouses, and enterprise apps.
On this last point it was good to see the rapid addition of classification and content analytics to the Xerox BPS suite, as demonstrated at its Fall analyst briefing, to classify and ultimately get meaning from scanned images and other content.
The next few years should see high growth in outsourced enterprise content services particularly capture, e-discovery, and email management. Managed services for the office will continue to expand as firms wrestle with poor device utilization, security concerns, and grasp the advantages of central management for this currently unmanaged area.
Craig LeClair
Forrester
cleclair@forrester.com