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Marketing Organizations are facing numerous challenges these days: Improving the efficiency of e-marketing, growing customer knowledge, improving the ROI of marketing spend among others. Sophistication in customer targeting, as well as advances in CRM tools, have not increased the effectiveness of marketing communications. The right offer is still not going to the right customer at the right time.
That's where Communication Engineering comes into play. Communication Engineering merges creative design, graphics, relevant communications, production knowledge and behavioral sciences to provide you with measurable business results. I recently presented a webinar that outlines the challenges marketing organizations face today and give examples on how Communication Engineering has improved response rates of various types of communications. I also provide a new model for campaign management and opportunities to achieve higher-level communications that drive your organizational objectives. To learn more about how Communication Engineering can help your organization drive results, click here.
Paul Lundy
Xerox Thought Leadership
Xerox Global Services
On December 3rd, 1-2pm EST, I will be showcasing a few trends and technologies that will make up the Future of Documents - and how can you make sure your company implements a smart document management process that positively impacts your business goals. It won’t just be “Audio with slides”, I will be using quite a few cool videos.
The registration page is here. Looking forward to see you there!
Francois Ragnet
Manager, Smarter Document Platforms and Components
Xerox Corporation
http://www.xerox.com/thoughtleadership/
http://futureofdocuments.blogs.xerox.com/
When it comes to outsourcing, common thoughts such as – Can I trust my partner? Will they deliver? Am I picking the right vendor? – come to mind. However, there is really so much more to consider.
Outsourcing can have profound effects on a company and can truly transform the way we work. But with this transformation comes the responsibility of how to address this change on all levels – financial, technological and with the actual workforce. Change management is all about how these changes are handled, with special attention required for the human element because it is so often underappreciated. It remains absolutely critical to the ultimate success of any outsourcing scenario.
How early do these changes need to be addressed? Don’t waste any time – change management processes should be developed right along with the outsourcing solution. This allows for a thorough understanding of the technical and service solutions of a project, as well as the people aspect, including a company’s leadership style, management process, the way they communicate, and the culture’s overall willingness to invite change.
It is vital that a vision for the new outsourcing arrangement be communicated to all stakeholders, so that it is clear that things will not just be different, but better. Couple this articulation of change with transparency of the objectives and companies will be able to build a level of confidence and trust among their organizations. As I like to say, you’ve got to get everyone on board before the ship sails.
To hear more about my perspectives on change management, please visit my new Thought Leadership website by clicking here.
Louise Fisher, director, European HR, Xerox Global Services
Recently, I participated in the Office 2.0 conference and really had a blast. Besides the sheer “collaborative” experiment, what I saw here is the next wave of Documents – available online or offline, social and collaboratively edited, evergreen “mash-ups” of content coming from various documents… Could that be “Document as a Service?” Beyond Google, watch out for technologies like SlideRocket, Zoho Docs, myBooo or others, to be disruptive in the next few years! I’ll be monitoring those.
I also moderated a great panel discussion on Document 2.0, or the role of Documents in an Office / Entreprise 2.0. Although standards and openness will play a big role, the panel agreed that even more important are on-ramps and off-ramps to and from traditional, legacy formats. Where it got even more interesting was the discussion on long-term preservation and records management, and how to make sure your document will still be available and readable decades from now. It became clear that quite a few members of the audience wanted to see cloud computing mature before they could trust their company’s lifeblood such as contract to the cloud – not to mention potential privacy and security issues. The video of the panel will be available shortly on the Future of Documents blog, along with more on a few of these Document 2.0 technologies.
Ironically, the discussion came back multiple times to paper as being a universal medium, yet to be replaced - interesting twist- in a paperless conference!
Francois Ragnet
Manager, Smarter Document Platforms and Components
XGS / GTOD / SDI / BPS
http://www.xerox.com/thoughtleadership/
http://futureofdocuments.blogs.xerox.com/
The race to success in today’s business world starts and ends on a budget. For companies of all sizes, the goal is to remain competitive while spending less. This challenge is especially great for small and mid-sized businesses that need to invest in order to grow.
It can be a struggle for SMBs to find the technology they need to succeed, without breaking the bank. However, companies such as Xerox recognize the unique business requirements of SMBs and have developed an extensive portfolio of technology that gives these businesses an array of options to enhance the ways they work.
For example, Xerox’s latest version of DocuShare, it's enterprise content management platform, is specifically tailored to the SMB crowd. DocuShare Express is affordably priced for smaller businesses and comes equipped with an easy, quick install process suited to business users – dispelling any notion that extensive IT knowledge is needed to get a content management solution up and running. To allow more direct integration with the multifunction display panel than ever before, Xerox has also made a DocuShare EIP Connector available at no cost.
It is important to realize that content management is no longer a necessity for only the largest of companies. It needs to be top of mind for smaller companies too. A key reason many SMBs fail within their first few years is that they’re unable to manage company information and processes, especially when the company begins to grow. Many smaller business owners are just focused on trying to get their businesses off the ground - instead of thinking about how vital keeping, storing and maintaining information, records and documents will be to the success of their business.
In an age of information overload, being able to obtain useful information and collaborate effectively is critical for organizations of any size, so it is important that smaller businesses have access to advanced, affordable content management solutions.
Jay Ganesh
Director, Channel Marketing and Launch
Xerox DocuShare Business Unit
I had a chance last week to moderate a lively and informative panel on enterprise content management at the CIO Forum and Executive IT Summit in Cleveland. The one key message that panelists drove home was that effective enterprise content management has to be about more than just installing software on a server and putting together a technology workflow.
There has to be organizational change and a commitment to optimizing the productivity of the assets of the enterprise in order to accomplish key objectives such as speeding time to revenue and rapidly managing costly corporate issues such as litigation risk. Effective ECM solutions start with understanding the needs of the business and how ECM technologies can enable or improve critical business processes. EMC solutions can help health insurance providers improve membership enrollment, can help financial institutions process and fund mortgages more quickly, can help companies manage and adhere to employment laws, or can help global manufacturing companies bring products to market more quickly. Today’s collaborative business environments are also requiring ECM solutions to extend out beyond our own firewalls to include our customers, suppliers and business or trading partners.
For example, one Xerox customer was able to change its culture from relying on snail mail to using Xerox Distributed Capture Service to submit account-related documents. Now more than 90 percent of its volume it submitted through devices with XDCS, improving time to revenue by taking a 3-5 day process down to just a couple of hours. The solution also significantly reduced expenses related to overnight shipping and long-term archival storage costs.
A second discussed example was how a large, global manufacturing company leverages document and content management technologies to better enable and support their legal discovery and litigation management requirements. This solution has created a more efficient process for their legal staff and outside counsel and has significantly reduced their costs.
So when your organization starts to think about ECM, think beyond a single hardware and software decision, and think about starting the journey with a single business application that has high-payback rather than trying to change the entire infrastructure, which for most companies is very difficult to do. Today’s solutions often include multiple technologies and integrate with the line-of-business applications. The key messages from the session were that successful solutions involve joint ownership and leadership from a business and I/T perspectives and that engaging outside partners can bring some of the best practices from the industry.
For open commentary and industry perspectives, visit http://www.xerox.com/blogs, http://www.xerox.com/podcasts or http://www.consulting.xerox.com/flash/thoughtleaders/index.html.
Rich Baily
Vice President, Business Process Services, Xerox Global Services
The office environment is constantly in flux and evolving as new accessories help make work flow easier and more efficient. Recently this became even more evident to me based on a conversation with a client. This gentleman informed me that he not only helped dramatically reduce his companies overall expenditure on promotional literature, but also increased their sales revenue by over 20% by altering how this literature was produced.
He informed me that his company use to prepare these huge elaborate informational binders which they sent to prospective clients. Each binder cost approx. $50 to produce and was quite heavy and expensive to ship. Looking to upgrade the presentation while reducing the cost, the company created a fluid digital presentation which they used their Xerox Duplicator to copy on to CD’s. This minor switch not only reduced the overall cost of each presentation from over $50 to less than $1 each, but increased their client retention and sales success rate.
How can such a simple change bring about such a major transformation? To me this shows the transition of today's office to a more digital workspace and how digital technology such as CD duplicators can not only be an integral office accessory, but also a financial asset. When you dissect the facts in this case, even though the original binder presentation was most likely very attractive and eye catching, and has the advantage that the reader does not need a separate device to read it, there were numerous drawbacks;
1) A binder is too heavy and cumbersome to travel with whereas an optical disc such as a CD or DVD (“Disc”) is light and easily fits in a briefcase or even a pocket for convenient travel.
2) Plus the shipping cost of a thick heavy binder is far more expensive than a small light Disc.
3) A binder is flat with two dimensional images, charts, and text whereas digital content on a Disc can offer eye catching graphics with fluid action and text that comes alive.
4) A binder can become dated and stale if it sits for too long whereas a Disc can have a link that directly connects to the companies website for the most up to date and relevant information.
5) A binder is susceptible to the elements and can become ruined if it comes in contact with rain or snow where a Disc is more tolerant to extreme conditions.
6) The lifespan of a Disc is far longer than that of content printed on paper.
This is not to say that Discs will wholly displace paper or other printed material, but rather to show the emergence of Discs and other digital content in the general office environment. When people ask me what markets are appropriate for an optical disc duplicator, I inform them any market that has content they want to store, distribute, or duplicate. So the next time you have a presentation or similar matter that you need to disseminate to any number of people or entities, look at the opportunity to take your company digital.
Ryan Swerdloff
VINPOWER DIGITAL INC.
"The Future of Optical Storage"
Click here to see more about Xerox Duplicators
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