July 1998
By Any Other Name,
Misunderstanding continues to plague COLD as a document systems solution. This lack of understanding is on the verge of holding back this technology from the mainstream solutions market.
A key part of this misconception involves the term "computer output to laser disk." COLD is foreign to the mainstream computer market, and I think this is due to the restrictive nature of the acronym itself.
The fast-changing technology market has created new computer output
(document) applications in which optical disks frequently have no place.
Information technology managers are frequently unaware of COLD systems or
the benefits of the technology. As a result, they are buying and building
alternative electronic commerce solutions that are, in fact, a natural
fit for COLD systems.
For example, electronic bill presentment is a recent Internet
innovation that has the potential to double or triple the existing "COLD"
market. These Internet billing applications are just beginning to hit the
market. COLD fulfills the need for the five-to-seven-year history of
billing data that is necessary for customer service. COLD offers
high-performance indexing to facilitate fast retrieval and it also offers
annotation capability for audit trails. COLD's full-page display
capabilities help you respond to customers and create copies of
transaction documents.
Another burgeoning area that holds promise for COLD is the development
of intranets for the distribution of internal computer reports. These
systems are now being designed with the express objective of providing
electronic delivery of computer output transaction reports to internal
employees. These daily reports -- general ledger, inventory, payroll,
etc. -- are a natural application for Web delivery, and this is a
capability that COLD systems could support.
COLD systems are now more globally useful as "computer output storage
and retrieval systems." Possibly "COSAR" more aptly describes their
capability.
Mason Grigsby is a partner of Imerge Consulting, which assists
clients with intranet/extranet document systems, electronic document
warehousing and Internet billing implementation. He is based in San
Francisco (phone: 415-775-4282 email: mason@imergeconsult.com).
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