I interview hundreds of professionals from all segments of the document imaging industry every year. Some days I do as many as three or four interviews a day. Sometimes it’s only one. Rarely is it none. More often than not, these interviews are informative and insightful.
An average week might feature an interview with Toshiba’s Bill Melo on Monday, Chip Miceli of DPOE and Ray Belanger of Bay Copy on Tuesday, Jennie Fisher of GreatAmerica and Lou Stricklin of Muratec on Wednesday, Tom Callinan of Strategy Development on Thursday, and David Scibetta of Copier Fax Business Technologies on Friday.
It’s equally gratifying that so many industry professionals are willing to take the time from their busy days to speak with me—and many aren’t promoting anything, they’ve just responded to my request to share their knowledge and insights with me. Well, maybe there’s some subtle promotion going on every now and then.
As much as I enjoy those days when I don’t have an interview scheduled (I can focus on writing and scheduling more interviews), I often feel as if my day has a huge hole in it if I’m not interviewing someone. It’s not so much the break from interviewing that I enjoy, it’s the break from transcribing those interviews once the interview is done.
Over the years I’ve acquired a knack for getting in and getting out of interviews in 10 minutes or less for a feature story that requires multiple interviews and 20-25 minutes or less for an interview on a single subject. If the interview extends beyond 30 minutes, clearly I’m not doing my job of keeping my interview subject on point. Transcribing is my biggest headache, or to coin a phrase that somebody else has already coined and I absolutely despise, my biggest “pain point.”
What’s that you say, “Voice recognition software”?
I don’t think so. Based on what colleagues who have used it have told me, it’s still not ready for prime time, especially when you’re interviewing someone driving in their car on speakerphone or someone speaking document imaging industry talk with all those crazy acronyms. Some of you out there may tell me otherwise, but that’s my take on it for now.
Another option is having someone transcribe the interviews for me. If this were a bigger business, that might work. I received an e-mail a year ago about a telephone transcription service. I ended up speaking to the rep for this company, but just didn’t feel right having my interviews transcribed by someone in a third world country and then not getting it back until later that week. I need faster turnaround than that—same day most of the time, and in some instances within the same hour. Plus it wasn’t worth the expense.
Let me reiterate, conducting these interviews is a joy. We all do things on a day to day basis that we like to do better than others, and interviewing is one of my favorite things. If you’re one of the people I’ve interviewed once, twice or a dozen times, thanks again. If it weren’t for you, these pages would be empty.
And for those of you still with me, I hope we have an opportunity to chat sometime in the future. Let’s not be strangers.
Thanks for reading.
