Pioneering Business Process Automation since 1994, ImageSource: Revolutionizing Businesses through Seamless Process Innovation and Future-Focused Leadership

ImageSource is a recognized leader in consulting, strategic analysis and rapid application deployment process innovation solutions. The company simplifies process innovation, offering advanced solutions powered by ILINX, the world's most flexible platform. Its dedicated team of experts is committed to ensuring customer partner success. By leveraging smart processing and dynamic user experiences, ImageSource empowers leading companies and public sector agencies to enhance efficiency, reduce risk, modernize operations, and transform customer experiences. The company’s unique approach combines adaptable solutions for various environments, making process innovation remarkably easy and accessible.

Terry Sutherland, CEO of ImageSource, spoke exclusively to CIO Bulletin about how his company has been modernizing operations and transforming the customer experience through process innovation for three decades.

Interview Highlights

Q. What was the motivation behind starting ImageSource?

We were founded in 1994 with the same driving force we see today: helping organizations automate their business processes. Thirty years ago, business process automation was primarily for compliance. We assisted organizations in setting up storage and archival systems for documents, the beginning of their digital transformation journey. Over the years, we have aided our customer-partners in expanding their vision for automation, innovating various business processes such as loan processing, accounts payable, claims management, and more.

Q. Can you explain about your services in brief?

ImageSource is the manufacturer of ILINX, the world's most flexible process improvement platform. Our unique approach to technology projects and process automation sets us apart. We collaborate closely with our customer-partners to understand their short-term and long-term goals, map their current processes, and create a vision for a future state. Our project methodology ensures quick wins for processes or departments, enabling organizations to witness improvement and progress as quickly as possible.

We have deep expertise in connecting ILINX to legacy systems, rarely recommending a rip-and-replace approach. Instead, we assist organizations in sharing information between processes while creating a forward path that reduces reliance on legacy systems, which often become difficult to maintain and support. ILINX is modular and robust, with modules focusing on AI, customer and staff experiences, all designed with a low-code/no-code approach for enhancing, building, and deploying solutions.

Q. Brief us about your ILINX platform. How does it enable organizations to modernize operations and achieve process innovation?

ILINX is a modular platform with a low-code/no-code methodology for seamless integration with other line-of-business applications. While ILINX can function as an end-to-end platform, we understand the challenges organizations face in replacing applications or components of their existing infrastructure. ILINX offers a solution by enhancing legacy operations through the addition of a digital experience layer atop existing components. We can also replace legacy systems by integrating and moving processes based on priority or risk factors.

ILINX is a fundamental component of hyperautomation initiatives for organizations, ranging from government agencies to global financial services institutions. Regardless of your current infrastructure, ILINX can assist you in modernizing and developing a roadmap for process innovation within your organization.

Q. What makes your products and services trustworthy? What makes your clients come back to you over and over again?

We have a remarkable 97% customer retention rate, and an even better project success rate. Our approach to projects makes us trustworthy. We are not done until our customer-partners say the implementation is successful. We stay close to our customers; from the beginning of the discovery phase of a project we have identified additional areas of opportunity for process innovation. We come back and continue to build out new solutions on the ILINX platform. Because of our healthy product roadmap, we continue to build vision with our customers for long term improvements. Essentially our customer-partners come back because we deliver, both on solutions and long-term innovation.

Q. How does ImageSource streamline operations to reduce costs and improve business agility?

Let's consider claims processing as an example. We collaborated with a Global Credit Bureau that received credit report dispute claims through both electronic submissions and physical mail. Both processes were subject to federally regulated response times. The challenge was in achieving the same Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for physical mail at a central mailroom. We assisted them in integrating AI into the digital mailroom process, ensuring seamless routing of documents to claims and aligning the workflow with the electronic submission process. Additionally, we developed a data loss prevention module on the ILINX platform, enabling their remote work business model.

This module is based on established user security policies, including location, safeguards personally identifiable information (PII) within the claims processing workflow. In a secure work environment, employees can access sensitive information such as social security numbers or complete addresses. However, in remote or work-from-home settings, they view redacted information to protect client PII. Alongside load balancing and secure content repositories, ImageSource has envisioned a continuous improvement strategy for their claims processing workflow.

Q. Tell us about your compassionate team. What value do they bring to your firm?

We have a team of process innovation experts. On our executive team alone, we have over 100 person-years of business process improvement experience. We have staff that has been embedded in our customer-partners project teams through staff augmentation and managed services we keep our customer-partners projects and technology initiatives running. We are a family focused company, including families in our annual all hands event, we include volunteer time in our benefits, encouraging our staff to take their commitment to the community seriously, and to bring back those initiatives for ImageSource support. We’ve become involved in several events with our customer-partners like St. Martins University and MiraCosta Community College scholarship fundraising.

Q. About the future, where do you see ImageSource in a couple of years from now?

ImageSource has been very focused helping organizations migrate their infrastructure to the cloud, if only for redundancy, but especially to set up our customer partners for faster execution of process innovation, for more predictable, manageable costs, and to eliminate the security risks posed by falling behind in security patches and updates. We’ll continue that initiative, while helping organizations develop reasonable, viable AI roadmaps with results. We want to help our customer-partners innovate for their organizations. Being current on your platforms and having an innovative technology roadmap impacts staffing, productivity, and ultimately compliance and the financial bottom line. We are committed to co-creating vision with our customers and executing successful process innovation projects.

About | Terry Sutherland

Terry Sutherland, the CEO and driving force behind ImageSource since 1994, has been instrumental in guiding the organization from an award-winning tech startup to a leading provider of process-innovation solutions. His strategic leadership, ranging from partner relationships to technology development, continues to steer ImageSource’s mission of enhancing lives by simplifying work.

Under Terry’s leadership, ImageSource has earned significant recognition and awards. The company has been featured on the CRN Fast Growth 100 list for three consecutive years and acknowledged by Inc. 500 as one of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States.

Mr. Sutherland is motivated by the belief that all organizations, from state governments to Fortune 500 companies, deserve faster processing, lower costs, superior service, and reduced risk. With the support of an expert team and the ILINX platform, Terry is more enthusiastic than ever to turn this vision into reality.