Some years ago I was working for a large computer manufacturer, when someone in management decided that there was going to be an explosive growth in the imaging market over the next few years.  At the time the idea that one could take electronic images of documents and store them on a computer for retrieval was just becoming feasible.  The company I was working for decided they would be able to sale a very large amount of computer hardware.  This was at a time prior to digital cameras and the PC.  Computer terminals were black and white.  (Or, was it black and green?) They were capable displaying only words, and these in 20 lines of 80 characters each.  The ability to show an image would be a great leap forward in technology.  For many years government and many companies had been micro-filming documents to reduce the space requirements of storage.  By putting such documents on a computer we would make them available anywhere that one could install a new type of computer terminal.  Up until then if you needed the data at more than one location you needed to make copies of the microfilm. 

The corporate marketing director for the Imaging Market made a presentation at one of the local western branch offices.  He showed us a forecast of double digit growth for the next 6 years.  The thing that caught my attention was that this forecast showed growth for each year something like 33.2%, 31.4%.  35.6%, 32.2%, 34.4%, and 36.1%.  That was a fantastic growth rate, but accurate to 3 digits? I had my doubts.  I asked from where the numbers had came.  He was very pleased with himself when he told me that it was from the American Association of Imaging Technology, Inc. (AAITI), the industry's largest user group of imaging.  I asked from where AAITI got the forecast.  This question he did not like.  Answering in a dismissive tone he said they hired a well know consulting firm specializing in the Imaging Market Place. 

Later that day I learned I had been appointed the Western Region Technical Specialist for Imaging.  I was scheduled for a 2 day training class in the corporate offices on the east coast for the following week.  I, of course, went with my best corporate attitude.   Several people, including some capable technical people presented what our product offering would be.  The corporate VP for imaging gave us the marketing talk.  He showed the same forecast the marketing director had shown us.  I asked my same two questions and got the same reaction.  In the corporate world it is really not risky to ask such impertinent questions as long as the people you ask are so high up in the structure that they hardly notice you.  Just make sure you don't embarrass your boss in from of her boss or her boss's boss.  Three levels down is as far as they pay any attention.

Some weeks later I got the opportunity to ask my questions again.  I had been sent to the annual convention of the AAITI.  It was a rather large affair.  There were well over 10,000 people attending.  So maybe there really was a Marketing Skyrocket about to take off.  Such conferences are usually divided into the vendor presentation area and the conference sessions.  As one of the major vendors with a very large display our group was given 2 passes to attend the conference sessions.  We had about 30 people at the conference.  The 2 passes would be shared among us all, or so I thought.  I was rather naive.  I asked if I could use one of the passes to attend session when I was not scheduled to work in our display booth.  I ended up holding one of the passes for the entire week and the second pass for half of the conference.  No one else appeared to be interested to hear what our prospects were saying and hearing about imaging.

Since there were more of us than were needed for the booth, I asked if I could attend quite a few of the sessions.  I told management I would write up a synopsis of each session and distribute it.  They thought that was an excellent idea and I got points for taking my position seriously enough to make sure I was well educated in imaging.  I was not just playing the subordinate to manager game.  I really do feel that if one is going to be an expert one really should know something.  Many of the sessions were about the experience of pilot projects at very large companies, such as Bank of America, American Express, Visa, Blue Cross, AT&T, etc.  I figured I would learn a lot about the actual experience of using electronic imaging and what these companies were planning as a follow up to their pilot projects.  Universally their follow up plans were - nothing.  Everyone reported that the time to manually gather the paper and get it through the document readers was far greater than expected and they could not cost justify further implementations.  Most of them had problems with certain types of documents.  Sometimes the paper was too thin.   Sometimes the paper color and ink color would not pick up properly and resulted in unreadable images.  This was the universal reaction at every one of the pilot projects.  In a couple of cases they were going to recommend that imaging be considered in the design of brand new systems, but not in any existing systems.  It did not look like the marketing skyrocket was going to get off the ground.  But, what about the market forecast.  Was I missing something? I wrote up my synopses, but made no verbal comments.  I doubt they were ever read.

Associations like this one make money from vendor fees, member fees, and book sales.  I visited the Association book sales area and found a 24 page report issued by the Association forecasting the future of the Electronic Imaging Market Place.  I also learned that the Association was mostly concerned with micro-film; electronic imaging was a possible side line.  I looked through the report and found the same forecast I had seen before.  But there was no explanation about the source of the growth rate figures.  The report was $85.  Seemed a bit much for 24 pages but I was on an expense account.  As I read through the entire document, I noticed that the author of the report was giving a presentation at the conference.

The author read his paper from view graphs.  There were about 600 people attending his presentation.  At the end he asked for questions.  I asked from where the numbers for the forecast came.  He very politely, with an attitude of how clever he had been, explained that he had sent a questionnaire to a couple of hundred VPs and marketing directors in the various imaging equipment manufacturing companies and asked them how much they expected to sell in the next few years.  He took the average for each year.  After that I wandered around the vendor area and without revealing I was from a competitor asked various executives if they knew about the forecast.  They did.  I asked where it came from.  They knew exactly and only what their counterparts in my company knew.   It came from the Association.

Some people bet their jobs on the imaging skyrocket.  Fortunately, I did not.  I had plenty of other work at other accounts in technologies that were not expected to grow at 30+% a year.  We never did sell any imaging systems in the western region. 

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