Input Management

The field of input management includes defining the approach to digitally capturing business-relevant data (“content”), selecting dedicated hardware and software, and integrating it into downstream business applications.

In inputmanagement, structured or unstructured data is captured from a variety of sources in order to supply it to information systems for further processing. The systems that capture data for input management purposes can include enterprise content management or data warehouse systems.

AIIM groups together those components, technology and approaches to enterprise content management which cover content capture under the heading of input management. In this context, “content” means all business-relevant data and other data already stored within the ECM system, such as paper-based documents or correspondence (unstructured content). Now as ever, this type of content reaches businesses in large quantities, and thanks to the rise of digital archives and document management systems, it is becoming increasingly common for it to be digitally captured and stored as a computer file.

At this point, the capturing process, or the input management process, uses scanning, imaging, OCR, barcode, ICR and full text searching technology. The complete value-creation process for providing digital data based on correspondence (meaning documents which would normally exist in a paper-based format) is described as input management, while the technologies used are grouped together under the heading of capturing.