August 2001
Document & Content Services Directory 2001
by Adam Throne
Service bureaus were once a predictable lot - as straightforward a business as any barbershop or corner butcher. In the old days, you would ship them boxes full of documents and they would send back rolls of microfilm. As technology progressed, service firms turned to digital storage, and they added searchable indexes so customers could find images electronically.
As corporations grew in size, so did many service firms, snapping up formerly independent mom-and-pop shops. The comfort of face-to-face contact was replaced with the security of a national service contract, with the expectation (if not always the realization) of consistent service and economies of scale.
More recently, Moore's Law and the Web have conspired to change service demands even more radically. As part of a quest to be more nimble and responsive to changing market demands, many companies have looked to outsource activities lying outside of their "core competency."
"Service bureaus that strictly performed [backfile] conversions in the past are now asked to run the mail room or scan centers," says Cliff Sink, vice president of business development for Imaging Services at Ikon, Malvern, PA. "The overall services have become richer and more complete." Payment processing and printing are just a few of the other services now commonly outsourced.
Some companies view information technology itself as outside their core competency, so they have turned to service firms to host their software as application service providers (ASPs). Sure, customers miss out on the fun of maintaining software and scaling server and storage configurations, but they are rewarded with the convenience of just typing in a URL and entering a secure password. The servers, software and storage reside at the service bureau.
"We serve companies whose internal documents reside with us," says Harvey Gross, vice president of document capture for Visions, an ASP-style service offered by Lason, Troy, MI.
Of course, ASP services would not be possible without the Web, and neither would a host of other services now geared to Web publishing needs. "Many are doing PDF conversions or paper to e-document conversion [through HTML tagging]," says Randolph Burns, director of marketing communications at Lason. "These sorts of services vary by the type of information being converted."
PDF is still the top choice for Web-based viewing of images, but Sink of Ikon says, "we're seeing some movement to new, compact file formats." File format alternatives include DjVu and JPEG 2000, which show up repeatedly in the listings that follow, but TIFF remains the universal standard.
When the documents in question originate electronically, one of the biggest challenges is turning this information into content that can be delivered online. Even before you can apply metadata, you have to create a taxonomy - consistent terminology tied to a predefined structure for information hierarchy and context. Once this brain work is well underway, the heavy lifting of tagging remains. As you'll discover in the pages that follow, many service firms have created or affiliated themselves with data entry shops in low-cost labor markets. Some of these firms tag files (and perform data entry) by the terabyte. Once the job is done, the content can be intelligently delivered, searched and linked online.
The service firms reported the information in the tables that follow through our Web-based questionnaire. Be sure to inquire about the exact nature of services and obtain detailed pricing and specifications as you compare offerings. Before you begin any major project, demand a detailed contract and thoroughly review the results of a pilot project before proceeding.
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