Not Just Makin' Copies

Remember back in 1993 when "The Richmeister" (Richard Laymer, aka Rob Schneider) observed his coworkers "makin' copies" on Saturday Night Live (SNL)? Just makin' copies was funny back then, and it's funnier now. When's the last time you saw "The Richmeister" on SNL? Maybe if you're lucky you'll catch him on cable comedy reruns.

Innovision Imaging (Phoenix) was founded in 1986 when photocopiers were an important tool, especially in the medical records industry. With just three employees, Innovision Imaging worked its way into the hearts of several hospital medical records departments. "We became an additional arm for them," said Jesse Palmer, director of business development. "We'd provide copies of patient records to insurance companies and attorneys. We'd pull files, make copies, log them, and refile them. And we wrote our own software to track requests."

The company name, Innovision, has always been intended to represent both innovation and vision, according to Vince Burr, Innovision's CEO. "We want people to think of Innovision as a company that sees trends before the customers know they need new technologies."

In 1994, Innovision Imaging began offering imaging services. Now, a room full of filing cabinets and records can be stored on CD-ROMs that take up much less space and offer more security and quicker access.

Photocopying physical files is no longer enough when it comes to retrieving and duplicating archived information. People don't want to fill out a form and wait around for someone to find a file and make a copy for them. Users want to point and click and see the document before they can say, "data warehousing." Why? It's not just human impatience. It's the age of information. It's the time constraints crunching everyone today. Though we have more technology than ever, the average person works as many or more hours per day compared to a worker at the turn of the century. So, when clients call for information, they want it - NOW, or sooner if possible.

Some billing departments request 15,000 pages per month from Innovision Imaging. The average client volume of data usable for warehousing is expected to grow from 393 GB today to 1.1 TB (terabytes) by 2003. Just in sheer volume, you can see why a faster method of retrieving images is important. Now, images can be tied to databases in data warehouses, indexed as fields of information.

A recent installation at the Colorado office of Minnesota-based TPA, Inc. is Innovision's biggest yet. Palmer described the imaging/data warehousing project. "This installation involved IMR's (Information Management Research) Alchemy family of software products. TPA, Inc., an insurance company, now has 600 users, a DVD jukebox, and RAID storage. The company has 10 or 11 different index fields it's using within Alchemy. Each document has a profile, and that profile contains those 11 fields. The first field is probably the claim number. That's what the claim operators are the most used to, and that's how they search currently," he said. "For example, we created that field and used IMR's Data Grabber to pull from that data file. Now, every time someone phones in and provides a claim number, the search is performed within Alchemy. The software pulls any document associated with that claim number. The document profile, with 11 different fields, is shown at the bottom of the image. Then, you can search according to any one of those fields. Once you get the results, you'll have the new images with the fields below."

"Once we get more of these installs under our belt, there'll be nothing we haven't seen," said Palmer. Innovision wants to be the leader in imaging and would like to move into Web-based data warehousing. "We want to be able to handle every obstacle that comes our way. If clients ask us to handle all of their records so they can tap into a database, we want to be the data warehouse provider. Data warehousing is our goal. Clients will have Web access via dedicated lines. When a customer comes to us and says it has 2 million documents, we want to store those documents on Innovision servers. We can create a database using Alchemy Web Server. We'll have big jukeboxes, DVD, or RAID storage attached to servers, so customers can dial in and access their databases. We want to distinguish ourselves as experts. We'll have to get additional T1 lines designed for digital communications in here."

Web Warehousing Becoming Big
Web-based imaging databases and data warehousing are the biggest movements in the market right now, according to Palmer. "They feed off each other," he said. "We signed up with Kofax a year ago, so we're set as far as high-production scanning. You need that if you're going to fill up a company's databases. Alchemy has its Web Server, so we're set as far as software goes, too. We're trying to stay on top of technology and keep track of trends, like Linux. We're hiring good IS (information systems) people and buying 'best-of-breed' hardware and software. Once you have the knowledge and know how the technology works, the rest is just a matter of selling it. Companies are willing to hand over their data to us."

Data Warehousing Moves To The Web
The 1999 Database Solutions III, a study developed by Survey.com, reports that "Across all enterprise segments, users plan to spend 191% more on data warehouses in 2002, rising to $6.7 million from an average of $2.3 million in 1999." This report contains the tabulated results of an online survey of 472 prequalified decision makers. These decision makers are directly involved with the purchasing and implementation of BI/DW (business intelligence/data warehouse) initiatives within their respective organizations. The data warehousing market is exploding at a rate of 43% per year from 37.4 billion in 1999 to 148.5 billion by 2003. Survey.com (formerly World Research Inc.), based in the heart of Silicon Valley, was founded in 1991 by Michael Bach. Some of its clients are Cisco, HP, IBM, and Sun Microsystems. Database Solutions III also reports that "Organizations are Web-enabling the data warehouse, and 87% of the respondents indicated that their DW [data warehouse] was designed for Internet/intranet access."

Vince Burr, CEO of Innovision Imaging, described his future typical data warehousing clients as companies that want to turn paper documents into e-documents. "They will be organizations that understand the value of information. But they won't want to spend a lot of money on infrastructure. Instead, they'll focus on business practices. They will want to image-enable their legacy, human resources, and outside sales data." Burr added that, with Web Server, any file can be accessed remotely.

Burr said there are two main reasons he wants to move into Web-based data warehousing. "The first reason is the acceptance of the Internet as an inexpensive means of communication," he explained. "With the growth of e-commerce, we no longer have to convince customers that the Web is safe. The second reason is that more organizations are relying on outsourcing. Our company can provide a support system with quick turnaround at a fixed monthly payment. Smaller companies don't have the technical support they need for data warehousing. We can provide that for them."

Questions about this article? E-mail the author at AnnD@corrypub.com.