Jan Andersson AIIMs for the Skies

By Liam Tung

July/August Edition, 2007: ReadSoft recently held its inaugural Oceania user and partner conference. Over 60 people attended to listen to speakers covering benchmarking, forms design, business process engineering and success stories. Liam Tung spoke to ReadSoft’s CEO, visiting from Sweden, to find out what the new chairman of ECM industry-body AIIM is doing for the industry.

The partner conference provided the perfect opportunity for ReadSoft’s Swedish CEO, Jan Andersson to check in with his Oceania team, which is now headed up by Canadian, Frank Volckmar.

For Andersson, it was a chance to get in touch with the industry after recently being appointed chairman of Enterprise Content Management industry body, AIIM. Andersson views AIIM as the focal point for the industry but says he looks forward to developing AIIM’s leadership through education and certification.

“We decided a few years back to invest in education both in the traditional way and also via web classes,” says Andersson. “These have been very successful and positive initiatives by AIIM for its members.”

Of course moving AIIM forward also involves bringing support to vendors and end-users. “We will continue to develop this and see if we can bring out more interesting products for vendors and end-users,” he says. “There will be a whole range of products and services offered from our chapter organisations and road shows.”

But these vendors, end-users and other members have been changing the mix of membership at AIIM, especially given the steady stream of mergers and acquisitions affecting the ECM market. “ECM is a must have for organisations today. I expect further consolidation in the market during the coming years and that Microsoft and Oracle will have a significant impact on the market,” says Andersson. “IBM on the other hand is taking a very steady grip over a large part of the market with its acquisition of FileNet.”

Meanwhile back at ReadSoft, Andersson is reiterating their focus on recognition software as a means to placing content management into the heart of organisations. These days, Andersson believes ICR and OCR rates are so good, there is little need for discussion and organisations can better leverage recognition software to integrate content into business systems. “Today it’s about efficiency, implementation and usage and how we integrate it with other systems. A lot of what we will be doing in coming years will centre on training the trainer and consulting to consultants.”

Although only visiting briefly, Andersson sees great potential for ReadSoft growth in Australia to build on the local strength ReadSoft has already acquired. “We’re focusing on segments—ReadSoft has noticed that bigger differences exist between SAP and Oracle users than do customers from different companies.

Combining his work with AIIM with upcoming releases at ReadSoft should definitely keep Andersson busy over the next 12 months. ReadSoft is gearing up to launch an integrated SAP Workflow and Accounts Payable solution for reading and capturing semi-structured forms, an invoicing solution built into the Oracle Suite as well as a new solution for Microsoft Dynamics. “Then we have the electronic mailroom business, which is our new software for handling all incoming documents, the idea being that all incoming documents should be electronic so you can sort and classify, read and index.”