19 June 2016

Throwback Thursday - Image bases information - The next step

Australian Legal PracticeJPG
This Throwback we are in April 1988 with Australian Legal Practice (Volume 1, Number 7) and Phillip Reynolds’ article Image Based Information – the Next Step.
“Information shared becomes knowledge. Information not shared becomes information marooned on an island. The competitive advantage depends upon better use of the information a firm collects today, but cannot use conveniently”
The article was written on the edge of computers takeover of the working environment. Just to provide some perspective of just how different it was here are some statistics from the article:
  • 95% of all information was still paper based
  • Clerical and support staff spent on average 4 hours a week looking for misplaced, mislaid or misfiled documents
  • Executive officers spent on average 3 hours a week looking for documents.

In light of this less than ideal situation Reynolds look to the increasing functionality of computers for the answer. Contrasted with the storage and updating capabilities of paper and microfilm Reynolds advocates the adoption of imaging technology (an rightly so). Reynolds recommends that future technology acquisitions include not only word and data processing but also image functionality.