All the technology in the world is worth nothing if it is not applied to real life problems. Common wisdom ? Not so. Many people in IT industry take a long time to realize that. They do not teach this at school, and it is so easy to get caught in the "IT for the purpose of IT" catch-22. This is where experience counts. The more levels of IT that you work on, more industries that you get involved with, more business users that you talk to, the closer you come to understand your own purpose. I have found my purpose through my experience during past twelve years. I have worked with number of life, health, property and casualty insurance companies, banks and investment brokerages, power utilities, human resources, manufacturing, travel and telecom corporations.

In all my experience with various clients, I have noticed that financial industry clients, tend to have the huge amounts of data being printed daily. Forest after forest. Ecologist or not, just vast amount of printed paper and effort associated with distributing it in a large organization has always been amazing to me. Not to mention the nightmares of recipients that are just to begin when they need to search and locate information in huge piles.

Yes, it was the 70's approach that lives even today. The architecture of the Information Systems of the 70's left us with legacy of almost every information worth anything being printed. At the time when the computers were considered to be an innovation and a change to the business process on a grand scale, it was understandable why all the paper "interfaces" had to be built. Simply, to integrate new computer systems with existing workflow it was necessary to do so. This legacy that still lives today can be characterized with data redundancy, data inaccuracy due to manual re-keying of data, manual data filtering and searching and various other potential bottlenecks in the business process. Any justification of such a process today, would be unimaginable.

Today, we have networks that are meant to be the backbones of our business. To carry the information from department to department and from employee to employee. Paper should be used as one of the media for communication with the customer, not to convey information through the business workflow. So, when you think of a network, an ultimate network of all networks, the one that exists today and not in the years to come, the one that is affordable and reliable, that can provide your company with a backbone for world wide operations, you think of Internet. Internet represents the media for fast, cost-effective data distribution. Internet is accessible anywhere in the world where telephone line exists. Internet uses standard transport protocol, which enables all clients, wherever they are in the world to talk the same electronic language. Internet can be as secure and private as you need it to be. And last but not least, as claimed by the creators, Internet was designed to be able to survive nuclear war grade damages to the network. What can I add ? Let's use it. Number of companies already do. Books, magazines, manuals and tutorials are all being published on-line on a regular basis. Some of the mentioned documents are being published only in "soft" copy. Distribution ease and immediate delivery have driven the demand for this method. Now if you just combine that with mainframe processing power... just let your imagination free.

Printout what ? Well, if you can do the "screen scraping" by creating new screens without touching underlying applications, why wouldn’t you be able to replace printout layout without changing anything in the report generation process? Screen scraping is a well known paradigm. Printout scraping is similar process, except easier to set up and use. Printout scraping provides immediate benefits with no transition period. It causes minimal disturbance to existing workflow. It is absolutely non exclusive, meaning that it can peacefully co-exist at the same time with current workflow with minimal overhead.

KISS or Keep It Simple Stupid is a famous American saying and even that it sounds funny it should be taken seriously. Simple things do work. Period. Complex things may work. If a simple thing breaks it is easy to fix or replace. Complex things are, er, well, complex. So, some examples of simple approaches to printout scraping are publishing of mainframe report files as plain text files just converted to ASCII or converting them to plain HTML. No bells, no whistles. Remember to focus on the fact that the business has been functioning for years based on paper. So what else does the business need apart from the raw information ? Hardly anything if we are talking about business continuation. If your project objective is to keep the same workload but to decrease cost of delivery, the simplest solution will be the best. There is no need to overdo IT.

But, simplification can have some rather costly ramifications, too. For example, one simple solution would be to try to implement a "new" architecture by changing all mainframe based source code to write out HTML output. Simple ? Right ? Yes, but imagine implementation nightmare of trying to change 20-30 year old code just for the sake of changing output records. In some companies, you'd wish for year 2000 to come again. One other, "simple" idea that would definitely drive you towards the dangerous grounds is an attempt to develop a "simple" program that will convert your documents from proprietary formats (such as AFP or Documerge) to PDF. Not just that it would be hard to develop, but maintenance and support would prove to be enough to drive everyone crazy. So, the simple, but not simplistic, is the solution.