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Remember the “paperless office?” The “paperless office” became a buzzword after being introduced in an article, “The Office of the Future,” in Business Week in 1975. It coincided with the advent of the personal computer, and the hope was that all documents could be processed electronically and that paper would become irrelevant.
But, has paper disappeared? Not at all. A few industries have gone paperless and some countries are decreasing their paper consumption. Actually, paper consumption is still increasing globally - soaring to extremely high levels (some estimates go as high as 10-50 trillion pages!). Paper continues to predominate in activities that involve knowledge work, reading and collaboration.
So how should your industry go about managing paper now and in the future, to really promote sustainability?
It starts with a careful, controlled and responsible usage of paper - using simple best practices such as thinking twice when you print, using environment-friendly paper, or (in the near future) preferring substitutes such as ePaper or transient paper.
It continues with printing duplex and N-pages up, or responsibly using color and other advanced techniques to make your printed documents as valuable as possible.
You should then go on with a careful optimization of your output infrastructure. Not only will right-sizing enable you to better control your costs and paper usage, but also its carbon footprint - this calculator lets you estimate your print fleet's impact.
You can find the above tips and many more in this white paper or visit the downloads section of Patricia Calkins's web site to learn more about "Smarter Ways to Green."
Francois Ragnet
Managing Principal, Technology Innovation
Check out my website
Check out my Future of Documents Blog
 AIIM is one of the best places to find out what's new and important in office imaging technology. Whether you are a buyer, or a seller (or both), the floor at AIIM is overflowing with current information and people who have answers. We from the Xerox Office group, for example, had integrated applications from our partner community (Equitrac, NSI, Nuance, Omtool, Streem, RSA and X-Solutions) all running on our EIP-enabled MFPs. As a result, we were able to draw from a wealth of technology to demonstrate real solutions to practical problems that customers brought to the booth.
And "customer" has taken on new meaning - especially in the context of the AIIM community. I spent as much (perhaps more) time speaking with prospective partners who were interested in how they could work with Xerox than I did with end-customers. At one point, I was speaking with a senior manager from the IT department of one of our largest customers - he was very interested in how the software developers on his staff could gain access to our SDKs just as any of our traditional ISV partners can. Standing by and listening to the discussion was a gentleman who represented an ISV that we don't currently work with - but was interested in getting started. The point is that all the points that were relevant to the "traditional" customer, were equally relevant to this soon-to-be developer partner; the extensibility of the MFP as a document platform in the infrastructure as well as the open-access program that we have established to enable all developers to have the SDKs.
So while this year at AIIM was the outstanding opportunity to network with old partners, meet customers on the floor with the latest array of technology and make inroads with new partners that it has always been, it was also witness to an important convergence. In a very real sense, partners are customers, and vice versa. These are truly exciting times in the office!
Roger Ellefson
Manager, Office Group Solutions Marketing
roger.ellefson@xerox.com
To some in the industry, transpromo (the marriage of transactional print and proactive marketing) has been around for a long time (we just never called it by a special name) and others believe it is the 'Googlization of Print' on the cusp of a new frontier. But regardless of which view you take, transpromo is here to stay. Therefore, it’s time to start looking at its challenges and turn them into successes. Joining me at AIIM/On Demand 2008 for a roundtable discussion on the topic were Noel Ward, WhatTheyThink.com; Mike Zeis, Blackstone Research; Stephen Poe, Crawford Technologies; Allison Lloyd, Document Magazine; Kemal Carr, Madison Advisors and Pete Basiliere, Gartner. Our dialogue provided great insight into how companies can not only utilize transpromo communications, but do it in a way that really resonates with their target audience. Here’s what we found:
Enterprises appear to lack a holistic document strategy approach to all of their mission critical customer communications. They think of customer communications as an obligation. The fact is, customer communications are and should be viewed as, an important opportunity that deserves a strategic plan and execution. Here are some strategies to help you embrace this trend.
• C-Suite Support – With all of the silos (Marketing, Sales, Operations, Customer Service, Legal, etc) you will need someone at the executive level to sponsor the initiative. This sponsor also needs to be an agent of change. A well connected executive willing to accept the old tried and true way is not going to breakdown the barriers that exist within companies to get this initiative moving.
• Educate – Every department needs to know what the benefits of transpromo can be. Put them in business terms that excites the CFO, the CMO, the LOB VP - increased response rates and conversion rates, decreased overall costs, and improved customer loyalty.
• Cross Functional Teams - Because transpromo crosses so many responsibilities, the core team needs to be cross-functional. Having this done solely by Operations or solely by Marketing will result in failure. A good cross-functional team is essential.
• Set Realistic Goals - Don't shoot for the stars to start out. Set aside pilot applications, offers, and execute in limited scale. Upon successful execution and measurement, then migrate to a broader application and continue to build on past experiences and learnings.
To hear more from our AIIM roundtable discussion, click here. To learn more about customer communications and engineering them for success, visit my Thought Leadership website.
Paul J. Lundy
Managing Director
Xerox Global Services
At the 2008 AIIM/On Demand Conference in Boston last week, I presented on risk, governance and compliance as it relates to records management. Barry Murphy from Forrester Research and I led a presentation session before a group of about 70. The audience was a sharp group of folks that certainly had some good questions for us.
Our presentation followed what we had heard from milling in the aisles at the Boston Convention Center; that managers need to be informed of the first steps in an overall risk reduction strategy through records management, and made aware of what they can do to get started.
Let me offer a few tips pulled from the presentation.
The first step is to create the right team. This team should encompass key stakeholders from the legal, IT and business communities; they must coalesce to become the retention management team. They have five core responsibilities that draw on their collective background:
• Understand how businesspeople consume information.
• Distill retention decisions for legal.
• Turn business needs and legal decisions into IT requirements.
• Conduct quality assurance of information classification.
• Lead the change management effort.
With a solid team in place, you must then simplify and automate policies. Don’t expect your enterprise users to learn complex classification policies; let the technology do it for you. There are a number of software tools that can shoulder the burden of sorting out complex systems, so let the technology do the work to reduce the risk of error.
Finally, allow your e-Discovery and retention management policies to drive longer-term information management strategies. Use the architecture your team puts in place to manage your records and inform future choices about how your information is managed. But most importantly, get out of reactive mode! Decide today that you will take command of your records and institute policies that will protect you and your organization.
Rich Baily
Vice President, Business Process Services
Xerox Global Services
Last month’s 2008 Annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Conference & Exhibition drew a crowd of more than 28,400 attendees and 900 exhibiting companies to Orlando’s Orange County Convention Center. The air was full of buzz surrounding the latest and greatest technologies for the healthcare industry. Among the hottest topics were electronic medical records (EMRs). While EMRs are no doubt the wave of the future and more and more healthcare providers are investing in these systems, the reality is, the healthcare industry itself is still very much a paper intensive business. With the right document management process, a huge source of cost savings can be uncovered for an industry that has little new money coming in. Through document processing services, paper driven processes become efficient, digital workflows. Consolidating office and production equipment reduces printing related costs and decreases energy consumption. Forms management systems provide doctors and nurses with print on-demand patient forms, eliminating the stock piling of bulk orders that often results in wasted paper and outdated documents.
The key to the document management process is implementation, a three legged stool you might call it – the people, the process and the technology. Healthcare systems with a comprehensive strategy in place are poised to combat the industry’s economic and regulatory challenges as business processes are transformed through streamlined print jobs and seamless day-to-day patient data management. New ways to reduce costs are uncovered, regulatory compliance is ensured and productivity is increased; leaving room for much needed investments in other areas.
Valerie Mason Cunningham
Vice President, Healthcare Industry
Xerox Global Services
What a difference a year makes in perspective. Last year, I had recently joined the Xerox Global Services organization and was still viewing the world through a mixed lens of technology (having moved from the Production Systems Group), and trying to understand the value-add of the services that we bring to our customers.
A year later, I am convinced that professional and consulting services is a critical element to enabling the success of application solutions and technology. In discussing this with several software providers, they are seeing a significant need in this area as well. The complexity created through mergers and acquisitions has driven a plethora of platforms and tools requiring integration or consolidation.
I also feel reinforcement that an application focus is critical. It is even more powerful when taking into consideration the unique factors – such as security and compliance – from an industry perspective. Many of the software providers I spoke to at AIIM have evolved into some type of industry specialization. This is not because their software doesn’t support all industries, but because they have developed an expertise around a set of applications that are repeatable. Therefore, customers have more confidence in their ability to implement efficiently and effectively.
All in all, it was a good two days and nice to catch up with some old friends I hadn’t seen in awhile. It reminded me that we are part of a community of professionals committed to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of how our clients communicate to their constituents.
Derrick Doi
Vice President of Business Integration and Market Development
Xerox Global Services
Hello from the AIIM International Exposition and Conference. Yesterday afternoon, I participated in a panel session titled, “The Document Outsourcing Market Opportunity,” where we discussed the growing market for document outsourcing and how customers can get the most out of the process. A key focus was on how successful document outsourcing is about more than just looking for ways to save money; effective document outsourcing will also improve your customer communications and grow
revenues.
Organizations need to find the right outsourcing partners. Too often, when a company jumps at the lowest-cost vendor there is a lower level of service associated with the cost savings. Services are fewer – resulting in a relationship that grows stale over time. But by finding an outsourcing partner that is a good cultural fit and building measurable goals together, you can avoid these pitfalls.
Finding the highest-value provider offers a company the benefit of more creative thinking for better customer communications, which ultimately helps grow revenues and attract new business.
Planning is another key. Poorly planned outsourcing can have a harmful impact on customer communication, including late mailings, compliance violations from “double stuffs” (person A’s statement in person B’s envelope), and incorrect letterhead or logos.
The audience asked some great questions that sparked a lively discussion that gave the panelists some things to ponder after we left the room. Document outsourcing is clearly a two-way street between vendor and customer, and these types of discussions will serve to produce better practices and results.
Bryan Baker
Enterprise Consultant and Thought Leader
Xerox Global Services
This week, Boston hosted the annual AIIM/On Demand conference and exposition. I participated, representing the DocuShare Business Unit as an attendee, a speaker, and a show floor “demo guy.”
While my professional obligations kept me from attending many sessions or “taking the temperature” of the show and marketplace, I can share a bit my experience from a presentation I gave at the show. AIIM, of course, is focused on enterprise content management and imaging – the capture and management of critical business information, usually document-based or -targeted. What better way to get the full story than go straight to the source – so I collaborated with one of Xerox’s customers to discuss the role of ECM in disaster recovery planning.
Abdiel Ortiz is the CTO (Court Technology Officer) for the 13th Judicial District Court of the State of Florida. Based in Tampa, Abdiel leads the charge within Florida’s judiciary for developing, proving, and deploying innovative solutions to information management problems. As part of an organization which must meet many high standards for information management and retention (and with serious consequences if those mandates are not met, e.g. the potential release of criminals), Abdiel takes his job very seriously. And as a resident of an area which is almost entirely less than eight feet above sea level and subject to regular hurricanes, he takes seriously the challenges of planning for the continuity of business operations and information accessibility in the event of natural or other disasters. DocuShare is one of many systems Abdiel and his team is responsible for, and it serves as the primary content management solution for a diversity of court records and documents. If DocuShare stops, the judicial process stops.
In our talk, entitled “Staying Ahead of the Storm,” Abdiel described how the 13th District has implemented redundancy in and geographically distributed their core IT infrastructure, targeting no more than 24 hours of downtime. Of equal importance, he described the planning, including documentation, processes and human resources, needed to ensure continuity of operations, including migration to hot sites or even adjacent counties if needed. I followed Abdiel with an overview of the elements of a disaster recovery plan, the levels of preparation possible (and the cost trade-offs associated with those different levels), and several anecdotal bits of advise for attendees to consider as they pursue assessment of their own readiness and development of their own plans.
As a key point of my presentation, I advocated for the role of the Enterprise Content Management system as a primary strategic element in any organization’s DR planning. Continuity of data availability and processing is critical for ongoing business operations. ECM systems enable the digital capture, management, and distribution of document-based information. A well-designed ECM system provides a platform which supports the implementation of a DR-ready document management solution which can be critical to the recovery and survival of a business after a disaster. And as demonstrated in Tampa, technologies like DocuShare, paired with appropriate host, database, and network technology, supports the implementation of both high availability solutions (tolerant of failures within the data center) and disaster-ready solutions (tolerant of the loss of an entire data center).
Abdiel did a great job telling his story and why it’s so important to “stay ahead of the storm.”
Tom Love
Director, Sales Engineering
DocuShare Business Unit/Xerox Global Services
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