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Innovative tech and the crucial role of CIOs

Technology plays an important role for every brand, and yet, when building a company, many CEOs still view IT as a necessary - but not innovative - part of the business. In order to thrive, businesses, and Chief Information Officers (CIOs) in particular, need to put innovative technology first.

The most-forward thinking companies are recognising this reality. According to a recent Deloitte survey, CIOs have already moved into chief executive positions in some challenger banks. And a survey by Forrester Research, which asked who is the most important senior leader in driving business transformation, found that the top answer was the CIO - ahead even of the CEO.

"Although this may sound surprising, it all comes down to the fact that we are living in an era of unprecedented digital change. Because with a growing range of technology to choose from, the risk of using the wrong one is high," says Nathan Nayagar, Managing Director for Lexmark - South Africa and English Speaking Africa.

Now more than ever, CIOs are increasingly looking for technology solutions to simplify their organisations' business processes. Lexmark's AccuRead Automate is one solution that helps make document management smarter and more cost-effective.

"Time constraints, employee training issues, limited network bandwidth; these are just some of the reasons why many businesses struggle to efficiently capture printed information for easy retrieval at a later date," says Nayagar. According to IDC, the average knowledge worker spends about 2.5 hours per day, or roughly 30% of the work day, searching for information. Moreover, much of this information is not available in a format that can easily be searched on the computer.

"AccuRead endeavours to alleviate these pain-points with smart capture features such as multi-page document recognition which eliminates manual pre-sorting, and expanded automation functions that provide even faster and more precise capture and processing of documents. This helps deliver far more efficient downstream processes," explains Nayagar.

In addition, the core features of the AccuRead Automate solution have been optimised - improving performance, classification speed and enabling more efficient storage in retrievable file formats. Overall, this results in a smoother and more agile operation throughout.

As accuracy is fundamental to smart data capture, Lexmark have equipped the latest version of AccuRead with more precise classification methods, and also enabled sorting through the full text - not just the layout of the document. This facilitates the recognition and classification of documents that do not fully match one of the "learned" categories and delivers an improved error rate.

In today's business environment, the technology a company chooses should set it apart, deliver the right results and help it engage with its target audience. The technology that works best for a company will differ according to its sector but the basic principle of deciding what to buy based on the best expertise available should apply. Technology errors can be simple to fix, but investing in the wrong technology can be very expensive. This means organisations need technology solutions that deliver every time.

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Lexmark

For the past 25 years, Lexmark International has produced innovative printing and imaging products, software, business process solutions and services for customers in over 170 countries across the globe. Each of Lexmark's 13 000 employees is driven to make every client a "customer for life" through the company's industry-leading technology and world-class customer service. In 2015, Lexmark reported more than $3.5 billion in revenue.

Editorial contacts

Taryn OBrien
PR Expert
taryn@prexpert.co.za