The fax of life

Don’t ignore this staple of communications in your cost-cutting plans and e-business strategies.

While others focus on the future of wireless computing and Web services, I thought it might be a perfect time to cast your attention to that basic staple of business communications: fax.

Fax isn’t about to disappear. Many companies send and receive as many faxes as ever. Because PCs allow knowledge workers to generate easily so many documents, fax traffic has even escalated.

Fax is an entrenched technology that users are comfortable with. It preserves document formatting. You do not have to worry about whether or not recipients have the latest version of Adobe Reader on their PCs when you send a fax. You do not have to worry about anyone altering your document—an important consideration when you’re sending a contract or other proposal.

Fax is also very immediate—both in terms of transmission and confirmation. E-mail, by contrast, can be an uncertain proposition. I have friends who often call me after sending me e-mail from their corporate desktops because, as they inform me, “We’re having a little trouble with our Exchange server.” Fax is more reassuring. As soon as the handshake takes place, you know you have a real-time connection.

And no one ever got a virus from a fax. They never got anthrax, either.

Of course, fax has disadvantages, too. Most fax systems don’t make it possible to do much with fax documents once you receive them, so fax can be a dead-end for business processes. There can also be image degradation, which is problematic if you’re working with small typefaces or fine images.

But fax is and will remain a fact of life. So, it’s probably a good idea if communications managers pay at least some nominal attention to how fax is used within their organizations and how that utilization could be improved.

THE HARD FAX

One obvious strategy for reducing fax costs is to implement fax-over-IP (FoIP). As with voice over IP, some people are skeptical about the potential for cost savings because of the fall in toll charges. The savings that FoIP offers go beyond that. With FoIP, you eliminate the need for multiple phone lines, since all your outbound faxes go over your existing Internet connection. In addition to getting rid of line costs, FoIP eliminates the fax boards and big, bulky fax servers that can be so expensive to administer over time.

FoIP doesn’t necessarily mean using the Internet, with its questionable reliability and security. Instead, you can use your IP connection to send your faxes to a secure private IP fax service provider—especially economical if your company does a lot of business overseas, since global providers do their faxing from in-country PoPs.

Fax can be particularly important for doing business in Third World countries where PC/Internet infrastructure is not as predominant, and in cultures where hard copy is considered essential to business dealings.

A tougher issue for communications managers is how to better integrate fax into business processes. The most basic way is to engineer fax into enterprise applications. This may involve automatically triggering fax transmissions based on events (such as an invoice being past due) or including fax documents into job folders (i.e., an image of a customer’s purchase order).

Digital archiving of faxes has become more important as companies become increasingly concerned with business continuity. Hard copy faxes are vulnerable to loss or damage, but if you convert them into digital format, they can be effectively archived and protected.

IN THE FAX LANE

The next level is to turn faxes into useful information. This can be done through character- and mark-recognition technologies. Not every organization can get good ROI out of these technologies, but I’ve encountered some interesting cases where, for example, an auto parts company was able to use fax and forms-recognition software to automate communications with its distributors—who lacked the wherewithal to do things online.

Fax is obviously too broad a topic to cover fully here. Just take this as a reminder not to forget about your company’s fax needs as you look for ways to trim your budget. Keep an open mind about using fax to streamline business processes. Fax may not seem very leading edge, but you sure don’t have to worry about it being hacked!

Liebmann is an independent consultant specializing in the application of networking technologies to strategic business challenges. Send comments for publication to liebmann@comnews.com.