I received an e-mail earlier this month from Access Innovations, Inc., an organization founded in 1978 and whose focus is Internet technology applications, master data management, database creation, thesaurus and taxonomy creation, and semantic integration. (I know, there’s a lot to Google there.) The e-mail was actually a blog post outlining Access Innovations’ Top Information Industry Trends of 2015.
A few of those trends identified by Marjorie Hlava, president and Jay Ven Eman, CEO of Access Innovations should be of interest to those in the document imaging industry. Those include the exaggeration about the demise of the physical book, analytics are booming, the changing information landscape, and baby boomers remaining in the workforce rather than retiring.
Here’s some excerpts from Hlava’s and Ven Eman’s blog along with links they included to support some of their claims:
The Demise of the “Physical Book” has been exaggerated: print is on the rise: At Techcom 2010, Nicolas Negroponte announced that “The physical book is dead.” In fact, five years later, the e-book is declining, while books have witnessed an incredible double-digit increase [in 2015].
Analytics are booming: Predictive text and search analytics are rapidly moving fields. Analytics help corral the onslaught of incredible amounts of information (“big data” in some cases) and translate the results into pictures or visualizations of the data in ways that are easy to understand by putting together trends and diverse data sets into meaningful, actionable data. End users are using linking and dashboard tools to uncover new trends, and content providers use them for market research and management.
Included in the area of analytics is data mining, which brings into focus large bodies of information, but also raises the often conflicting issues of privacy, security, and freedom of expression.
The changing information landscape: Libraries are disappearing, information storehouses and archives are appearing, corporate information is still hard to find, and knowledge walks out the door when employees leave. In the meantime, we can look up anything during a dinner conversation (just ask Siri, Cortana, Alexa, or Google). The need for printed references is declining as Siri (and her companions) can find things on the web and point you to valid links…now everyone is a consumer of digital information, and the demand/need for information is increasing rapidly. Barriers to information access come and go—which creates demand.
Boomers are not retiring: It isn’t just that they are getting older and might not have enough money; they don’t want to give up and transition out of the workforce. They like what they are doing, feel like they have a positive contribution to make, and would like to continue to do so.
