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Here's a scary thought: a survey by AIIM showed only 26% of mid-size businesses surveyed had ever heard of "enterprise content management." Only 47 % recognized the term "electronic document management." The big winner was "document imaging" which was recognized by 66%.
I'm a CMO, not a techie, but these stats are frightening -- even to someone like me.
This week, after keynoting Visioneer's reseller partner meeting in Cancun (more on that later) I sat down to listen to AIIM's John Mancini who shared good news and bad news about the ECM space. On the plus side, he said document management has finally found a home in many IT departments. On the downside, it's still the domain of big companies, and most small and mid-size businesses do not yet understand the value. That was seen as an opportunity for the 150 resellers in the room.
To do its part, AIIM changed its tagline from "AIIM: The ECM Organization," to "AIIM: Find, Control and Optimize Information." I can relate to that, coming off of Xerox's recent re-branding effort. We too had to change the way we project ourselves in the marketplace to reflect who we are and what we do today. I covered that in my keynote and also touched on the power of partnerships, color, sustainability and innovation as differentiators in today's increasingly commoditized world.
Murray Dennis, the visionary CEO of Visioneer and all around good guy, is on the same page. He and his team have transformed Visioneer from a small, consumer-oriented scanning company to a significant player in the business market. And, if the resellers at his meeting are any indication, he's on to something big. Visioneer likes to say "Paper is just a temporary state of information." Xerox supports that statement and we are proud to have Visioneer as a brand licensing partner for Xerox DocuMate scanners and as a technology partner for our higher-end solutions.
In the end, a couple of things were clear to me: Cancun is not a bad place to be in mid-February. And we all need to do more to engage the IT community and educate the market on the value of "enterprise content management" even if we don't call it that.
There's big prize for vendors, resellers and customers if we do it right.
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Mike Mac Donald
President, Marketing Operations
Xerox Corporation
All the manufacturers, industry analysts and press like to look at the MFP market in segments such as tabloid vs. letter, monochrome vs. color, or ink jet vs. laser - with or without solutions. This clearly reflects our organization and how we look at hardware products based on what it takes to develop and manufacture them. But, it reflects little on how the customers ultimately use the machines. I would propose that: few tabloid products are purchased primarily for the tabloid capability; most every customer prints in both monochrome and color whether it is on the same unit or separate; few end users care what the marking technology is; and all customers tend to look at the total functionality of their product whether it is software that has been there for years (for example Postscript) or something newly developed and added with the product in the form of a software solution.
In 2008, we need to move more aggressively towards looking at the market relative to what customers really do with the products. Tracking between distributed capabilities vs. centralized, scanning applications vs. printing, total color pages vs. monochrome pages - independent of the device are all starters. While I’m at it, dividing up the market by price band is much more relevant to the customers than speed bands.
Dave Bates
Vice President, Product Marketing
Xerox Office Group
Why EIP? There are not many times we have the opportunity to face a big change in the industry. We find ourselves in the beginning of a journey that will definitively change the way we interact with technology, not only in the office, but also in the rest of our lives. Users have taken the lead in deciding how they want to work and the economic situation has encouraged the evolution of the information worker. So, the time of providing access to information has gone and the challenge is to provide it in the way that people really want it. We decided to open the door of our systems to the world - this way they can adapt to the business, providing the right info to each user in the way it suits them. But that also means we can't do this journey alone - we need the rest of the players in the office value chain: our partners. The good news is that we know them and that’s a great position to be in. Of course, we are not alone. The competition is playing in this space too and this is great because it means we going in the right direction. Thankfully, the industry analysts see us as best positioned, so there is just one thing to do, hit the road. The 6th of September is the day.
Jose Nevado
EIP Marketing Manager, Office Group
Xerox Europe
All businesses exist on a continuum between efficiency and responsiveness and in the high change and unpredictable world we live in, responsiveness trumps efficiency. Business strategies that emphasize efficiency and economies of scale no longer yield the profits we seek because they are so vulnerable to unexpected or sudden changes. The very act of optimizing operations and cost structures for efficiency robs companies of the flexibility and resources they need to respond effectively to change and new opportunities.
Because of their lack of responsiveness, companies optimized for efficiency find their only option for dealing with unexpected changes is to shed employees, cut costs and downsize. Their repeated bouts of downsizing and then rehiring remind me of the attempts people make when they go on binge diets. They get some immediate short term results but over the longer run their condition just gets worse.
Many brand name companies (such as Motorola, Kodak, Ford and GM) are showing us their focus on efficiency is not shielding them from market fluctuations; their business models no longer work. Their strategies for efficiency are based on 20th Century industrial concepts like spreading fixed costs across huge numbers of units sold, long production runs, and the assumption that there is a steady, predictable demand for their products.
In reality, these things are conspicuously absent from our global economy. Companies that succeed these days are the ones able to make continuous small adjustments in their operations and product offerings as events unfold. Business success means to be “efficient enough” and concentrate instead on being highly responsive to markets and individual customers.
Toyota makes money making cars where Ford and GM do not. They prefer to use smaller more flexible machines that can be quickly reconfigured to do a range of different tasks instead of using big and complex machines that attempt to maximize efficiency in performing a single task but cannot be easily reconfigured to perform new tasks. Toyota focuses first on responsiveness.
The Internet itself is optimized for responsiveness, not efficiency. It was built to operate in a high change world. It is full of redundancy and multiple pathways from one point to another. It is composed of interconnected networks of autonomous operating units that can each sense their environment moment to moment and then respond quickly as situations change. This is what makes it so stable and scalable.
We talk a lot about innovation so it’s important to see the connection between innovation and responsiveness. Innovation usually doesn’t mean creating something wildly new and different; it mostly means continuous incremental improvement to existing products and services to better fit changing conditions.
In the business IT ecosystem of networked PCs, servers, printers and handheld devices there are a hundred opportunities every day to make constant small adjustments to help customers respond to surges in demand for existing services and emerging demand for new services. If you are a supplier of these products, what responsive new offerings have you rolled out lately? If you are a user of these products, what do you use this stuff for and what would make your life easier?
It’s important to note that all innovation, all responsiveness is information based. What is innovative and responsive to one customer in one circumstance is not so to another customer in a different circumstance. You need constant and current information about your customers and your products to know the difference. Success lies in putting this information to work to create a continuous stream of improvements and enhancements based on existing products to fit the constantly changing needs of specific customers not just a mass market.
The customer is the ultimate asset these days, not your plant or your equipment or products. The opportunity now is to apply what you know about your customers and what you know about your products to create a tailored bundle of products and value-added services that constantly evolves to best fit your customers’ needs. You combine your knowledge of your customers and of your products to become, in effect, your customers’ purchasing agent. You’re someone constantly seeking the best mix of products and services to fit customers’ changing situations, not a clever gadfly trying to sell them something they don’t need because if your customers don’t grow and prosper, you won’t either.
Responsiveness means you co-evolve products with your customers. Involve them in the process of designing new products. For instance, Xerox engineers thought commercial printers wanted printing machines with a second print engine to handle specialty jobs and inks – an idea based on industrial concepts of specialization and efficiency. Instead, they discovered what they really wanted was a machine with a second printing engine for backup to keep production going even at a lower rate until the big engine could be fixed – an idea based on responsiveness through backup and redundancy.
Think of your customers as your capital and think of responsiveness as the way to earn interest on that capital. The bigger the base of customers, the more the opportunities there are to be responsive to their changing needs. Opportunities these days quickly evolve into other opportunities; one opportunity usually leads to another; learn to ride the waves of change. Develop a reputation for responsiveness; your customers will seek you out for this very reason.
Michael Hugos
CIO at Large
Center for Systems Innovation
As publisher of CIO Magazine I meet many chief information officers and senior IT executives. And, I have access to the planet's best research on what motivates these important tech execs.
Better communication with key constituents and alignment of business and technology initiatives remains at the top of their agendas. And has so since 2004.
And that's why the following set of data puzzles me.
The US Department of Commerce reports that corporate profits in America have been at double digit levels now for 16 consecutive quarters. Or, since June 2002. At face value that would seem to suggest a receptive environment in the corner office to increased tech investment.
But that is not the case.
The well respected and widely published CIO Magazine Tech Poll, conducted quarterly in conjunction with Deutsche Bank since August 2000, reports tech budgets in the United States will increase a paltry 6.4% in the coming 12 months. And, that includes ops expenses like staff salaries, overhead etc.
The final piece of perplexing data comes to us from Gartner which has a report out claiming growth in tech investments will lag topline growth in corporate America until 2010!
When I ask myself "why", the only conclusion I can reach is this: CIOs are largely failing in their missions to communicate the business value rationale of IT investment. One would think, it they were better communicators, the growth in IT budgets would at least match topline growth of the firm.
What's your take? What grade would you give CIOs and senior IT execs you know as communicators?
My November 1, 2006 column covers the topic and offers up the CIO IT Value Matrix poster as a roadmap for better communication.
Gary Beach
Publisher
CIO Magazine
508 935 4202
I just spent two days at the Global Technology Distribution Council (GTDC) Summit in San Francisco. GTDC brings people together from all the major distributors (Ingram Micro, TechData and Synnex, etc.) along with vendors from IT industry. The buzz coming out of the official sessions and the lobby bar at The Fairmont was the push to higher value relationships between distributors, resellers and vendors. Solution providers who want to grow are developing expertise in delivering services to their customers mainly in the SMB market.
There is a spiral of commoditization on the technology side of the IT market. As suppliers and channel partners, there is a lot to gain by looking into developments that offer more value than has yet been realized – partly because the technologies have not been fully adopted and partly because the value potential has not been fully harvested. Some of the big opportunities revolve around things like VoIP, network storage and document management. We’re starting to deliver assessment services, fleet management, content management, and cost-per-print tools and programs through resellers.
At GTDC, a few things became clear to me:
1. Some successful solution partners are already pursuing value-added services opportunities in document management and would like to get more support from the vendors and distributors to help them. 2. Some distributors (like Synnex) are laying the ground work to ramp up their support dramatically in this area. But, 3. No one has it fully sorted out.
We need to heighten the level of discussion and collaboration. What do you think? And what else should we be doing to make this opportunity more meaningful sooner?
Jim Firestone, President, Xerox North America
Hello, again – one of the reasons this blog is worth doing is that it can serve as a kind of virtual water cooler – generating all kinds of interesting comments and conversations.
So we’re going to jump-start the dialogue and try something new at Xerox’s annual Industry Analyst Briefing, September 6-8 in NYC. This is an event where industry gurus from leading research firms get together for an update on our strategy and progress to date. It’s always a valuable event, and a little humbling. The Xerox folks normally come armed with massive PowerPoint decks. And the analysts are ready with their toughest questions.
It occurred to me that some of the most interesting, honest discussions and exchanges happen during the coffee breaks and in the hallways between the formal sessions. So I thought it would be worth bringing some of these conversations onto this blog. And because we never have time for all the questions during the briefing, we can use this space to cover more ground. We’re inviting the industry analyst community who will be in attendance -- as well as followers of this blog -- to post questions and thoughts prior to the event, and live in a special forum during our presentations.
My colleague Tom Dolan and I will address as many of the postings as possible during the live Web cast on Thursday the 7th at 9 a.m. EDT and will then follow up with postings for all to read. I hope this will give an opportunity for everyone to participate in this event – as well as to start a compelling dialogue here.
Using this blog in this way will be another first for us. But listening to the industry and reacting to changes in real time is nothing new. So grab a virtual paper cup and gather around. Share your thoughts and questions related to our business, the industry, and anything else that’s on your mind. With any luck it will be an interesting chat.
Jim Firestone, President, Xerox North America
Since the inception of Sarbanes-Oxley, and even earlier as driven by HIPAA, protection of information assets has come into the forefront of IT concerns. The nightmare scenario is having key intellectual property leave the organization without detection until it is too late. Maybe it’s a key manufacturing process, or an integrated circuit design, or a proprietary search algorithm, or even a soft drink’s secret formula.
IT is increasingly taking the lead in making sure that the necessary controls are in place to protect both personally identifiable information, and core intellectual property assets. The emphasis has been on the desktop and network boundary, and increasingly as workers become more mobile, or portable devices and the virtually unlimited storage capacity in them.
However, only recently have the most proactive organizations begun to consider office equipment in their overall compliance plan. Am I talking about the copier, you ask? Well, the truth is what looks like just the innocuous office copier is today a sophisticated device with a powerful computer embedded in it. From the network point of view, the “copier”, or as we prefer to call it, the multifunction printer, is just another network node. MFPs copy of course, but they also print, fax, scan and email. The devices exist to increase productivity and reduce cost. However, they need to be managed in controlled in a way commensurate with their power and sophistication.
Putting one of these devices on your network does not immediately open you up to attack. But with any information technology, there needs to be defined policies for deployment and usage. Who is allowed to use the device, under what circumstances, and how can that usage be monitored to enforce compliance? This means that devices need to have robust access controls, including strong authentication and authorization mechanisms, preferably integrated with the network domain. It means devices should have the ability to control usage so that only properly authorized individuals can use the advanced features. And there has to be the tracking mechanisms in place, like an internal audit log, so that there is a reliable record of who did what and when. Just imagine the damage if someone were to send an inappropriate email from one of these devices, without having been required to log in and authenticate, or without the ability in the device to track who was sending the email and to whom.
One thing customers should be factoring into their purchasing decisions is whether the machine is Common Criteria, or ISO15408, certified. The Common Criteria is an international standard for evaluating information technology products. The value of the standard is that it is internationally recognized and therefore provides a basis of comparison of the security robustness of various products. Most MFP manufacturers have obtained a certification for components of their MFD system. Xerox is the only manufacturer to obtain certification for the entire device. One of the unique things about MFPs is the inclusion of page description language interpreters that allow them to print documents. Of particular concern is PostScript which can be manipulated to access proprietary areas of the internal disk outside of the intended operation, and then to either reprint that information when commanded by the attacker, or even send it back to the attacker over the network. It’s very important that the internal design of the MFP has the proper controls on PostScript so that it performs its intended function without the possibility of compromise. Many vendors usually ignore PostScript when they submit their devices for certification. They also tend to ignore the internal web server, which is another very popular avenue for attack. And finally, they ignore the fax interface and whether that presents any ability to dial into the devices and gain access to the network. The situation is exactly analogous to checking that the front door of your home is locked while ignoring all the other doors and windows. It doesn’t matter how many deadbolts you’ve got on the front door if the back door is wide open.
Finally customers should be looking at the vendor as whole. The vendor should have the necessary global coverage to support large multinational entities, and the quality of design that provides confidence that security controls are being implemented in products across the board. Then the customer can have confidence that not only is the behavior of the devices standardized across the fleet, but that also the vendor has the necessary support infrastructure to assist the customer in the protection and control of their important company information.
Larry Kovnat
Product Security Manager
Xerox Office Group
http://www.xerox.com/security
For more information: IT Security Webcast
Hi. My name is Jim Firestone and I am the President of Xerox North America.
As a result of my job, I spend a lot of time speaking with customers, industry analysts, financial analysts and our own research and development teams about the future. One thing that is clear to me is that we are living in the midst of a sea change of enormous proportions in how, when, and how often, people communicate How this all plays out is not certain and we are all, (those of us in the IT or the communications industries, at least), trying to figure it out at the same time.
I thought that a blog might be a good chance to dialogue about this change, what the future holds, and hear what others are thinking. Hopefully, it will foster spirited discussion and debate around some of the key inflection points we face. Being purely selfish for a moment, this will help Xerox better understand what the world is thinking and where it is likely to go. But it should also provide a forum for everyone to learn and develop their ideas. I am clearly not the expert on this topic, but I can bring experts from Xerox and elsewhere into the discussion. Who knows what ideas and insights might flow from this.
This week I am preparing for the AIIM/On Demand show in Philadelphia so I am spending time refining my thoughts and comments. While I am there I will be speaking about this sea change.
So what is this sea change I am talking about? In many respects, it is the end of the technology revolution and the beginning of the information revolution. We are entering a period where the focus in IT is not on the "T", but on the "I". We call it Big "I", little "t". The technology infrastructure is no longer the primary focus because we are all networked, web-service enabled, ERP'd, and outsourced. Now we can get to the real challenge: making work easier. And to do that we need to focus on the information that rides on the technology railroad.
Two immediate and huge implications come to mind.
First, all communications should become personalized, customized and just in time. Every piece of communication. From books, (think Amazon or Barnes and Noble without a warehouse), to direct marketing, to customer collaterals, to education etc. Why wouldn't all of these be tailored exactly to the need at hand. The technology is there. From the creation of the communication, to the data base of insight, to the digital print, or electronic display and archival. We call this the New Business of Printing and it will revolutionize printing everywhere over time.
Second, what about all the document dependent processes that are the core of most enterprises or governmental institutions? These are all legacies of an analogue world. Most of these processes predated today's technology. But now they have been "hardwired" into the organizational structures of most institutions and are so taken for granted that often we don't even see them anymore. Well, technology exists to create self correcting and self routing documents. Digital repositories that know what versions are correct for which situations. Intelligent scanning. Paper with embedded audio or video files. The mind boggles. We call all of this "Smarter Document Management" and it will have great fundamental impact on how organizations of the future operate.
But I am getting carried away with all this. Now let's hear from others. It is real? Is it important?
With AIIM/On Demand coming on the heels of the World Congress on Information Technology gathering in Austin, Texas where industry leaders like Steve Ballmer, Michael Dell, Paul Otellini and Anne Mulcahy talked about the role IT plays in issues like the digital divide, security, compliance and health care, maybe there are some more compelling topics to discuss. If anyone was there, what do you think? What do those of you going to AIIM /ON Demand hope to see while you are there?
Thanks for listening. But, now, what do you think?
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