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David Tyler: Can you give us some of your views on the future trends you see around document capture and information management?
Tim Brosnihan: We've seen a lot of changes in the document capture market over the years, mostly driven by changing IT technologies, infrastructures and business working practices. The recent meteoric rise of smartphones, tablets and other mobile technologies has changed the way we work dramatically, especially when it comes to handling information. We're living and working in a digital age in which mobility is key. We have also seen a rise in the volume and variety of electronic documents that require processing every day. We conducted an independent Office Insights report that surveyed 1,671 employees and decision-makers across Europe and found that many organisations are being too slow to address those changes to end-users' working practices. The technology regularly being used in the workplace is therefore often outdated and no longer efficient, because it doesn't reflect this trend of mobile working.

Businesses are constantly looking for new solutions to fast-track the processing of paper-based information. They want to utilise new capture technologies for extracting paper-based information into their business processes to help reduce costs and boost efficiencies, and service levels. The days when scanning was mainly used for archiving documents are long gone, and so it's not surprising that information and document handling technology is absolutely critical for the majority of the workforce today. Our research found that a staggering 91 per cent of respondents see a scanner as important or critical in their job, while more than one-third predict they will scan more in the future. With scanning being so important to employees, organisations need to take it into consideration when setting up office technology that is future-proof.

DT: How are these trends around the handling of information and documents driving the development of Canon's document scanning devices?
TB: We have a close eye on market trends and listen carefully to both our customers and partners when investing in the development of new devices. It is important that we can offer our customers the best capture solutions that can adapt to their changing business needs and environments. For example, we're finding that employees are spending less and less time at their desks - in fact almost 13 per cent of the UK workforce today is based predominantly at home offices and 30 per cent of European office workers claim they work more often remotely compared to a few years ago. But whether visiting clients, working in remote branches or from home, the common need is for technologies that enable them to work efficiently from these remote and mobile sites. Such as automatically sending scanned documents to cloud-based applications, which half of the respondents of the Office Insights report valued.

One of our latest devices completely designed around a mobile working lifestyle is our recently launched ultra-compact scanner, the imageFORMULA P-208, which you reviewed recently. It's one of the smallest USB-powered mobile scanners on the market that incorporates an automatic document feeder and duplex scanning, which means it is extremely mobile while also really helping mobile workers to get their job done. It's so mobile that, when you and I took it 308m above the London streets to the top of the Shard, we were able to capture and process documents as easily as in a normal office. The scanner comes with a big software suite that supports cloud services, but you can also just plug it into any laptop and scan away, without having to install additional software or drivers. As your review said, "It's an innovative device that stands out," and this was exactly our intention - developing a device which meets the upcoming trend for mobile working.

DT: We've talked about scanning obviously, but what about the wider office technology market? Do you see any changes resulting from this demand for mobile?
TB: Offices up and down the country process a staggering amount of information every day, either electronically or paper-based. Devices such as printers, scanners or copiers are unsurprisingly still among the most common technologies found in the office environment and almost one in three end-users say they would not be able to do their job without them. However, the demand for mobile working is slowly beginning to change the office technology landscape. Traditional devices won't be replaced anytime soon, but instead we are seeing employees and organisations adding additional - mobile - devices to the office technology mix to support a more flexible and mobile workforce. An overwhelming, 96 per cent of respondents in the Office Insights study even stated that they couldn't do their job without their own smartphone!

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