CTO Blog
I was indicating that I was rather disappointed not have a good technology topic for a while, and would you believe it but they both cover the topic of printing, a good old fashioned technology that was supposed to die as the ‘paperless office’ took over. Now, Green IT has really put this back on the table again as a ‘sexy’ topic, and printers everywhere sport labels asking if its really necessary to print this item.
I find this a great example of the real problem, the way we work is the issue, and in the case of the labels they are pretty useless as the only time we visit a printer is when we have already sent something to the printer to print. Well I suppose we might be in time to hit the ‘cancel the job’ button, but really the time when you see the warning is when your are collecting your printing.
That’s what makes me bring up eCopy who, though they are not that new, having been founded in 1992, may be just getting to hit their stride as Green IT drives more interest, and they have now got some new partners. Put incredibly simply eCopy integrates digital and paper based workflows using a single interface to integrate the paper element into the enterprise IT systems using what they describe as a Multi-Functional Peripherals, MFPs. The kick up has come by Cannon, Toshiba, Sharp, HP, Konica, Minolta, ND Ricoh all deciding to support this approach thus making any of their ‘paper processing’ products able to be shared and part of the digital workflow. You can follow the details on the eCopy site.
Why it appealed to me was that I got a call about supporting an event on Green Computing, and the day before a call about a government institutive to be more ‘Green’ in their use of IT. Both depressingly started around the data centre as the big issue, though I am not saying there wasn’t any interest in other topics, but it has always seemed to me that we are not asking the real question. I.e. it’s not about restricting, or rationing, what we can currently do, it’s about finding a better way of doing it in the first place.
That’s why I like the eCopy solution; it’s elegant in its simplicity and focuses on the real issue which is how to make the end to end process more effective so that users will want to adopt it as an improvement to the way they work. If you haven’t seen eCopy and you are worrying about putting a green element in your plan for 2008 here is a potential quick win in my book. But my real issue is that we can’t just accept these arguments to cut/virtualise the data centre as ‘the’ answer, we need to re examine how we work and adopt different less wasteful ways of working. And that doesn’t always mean complicated new technology it can be pretty simple and basic stuff.
About the author
Capgemini Global Chief Technology Officer, Andy is a member of the Capgemini Group management board and advises on all aspects of technology-driven market changes, together with being a member of the Policy Board for the British Computer Society. Andy is the author of many white papers, and the co-author three books that have charted the current changes in technology and its use by business starting in 2006 with ‘Mashup Corporations’ detailing how enterprises could make use of Web 2.0 to develop new go to market propositions. This was followed in May 2008 by Mesh Collaboration focussing on the impact of Web 2.0 on the enterprise front office and its working techniques, then in 2010 “Enterprise Cloud Computing: A Strategy Guide for Business and Technology leaders” co-authored with well-known academic Peter Fingar and one of the leading authorities on business process, John Pyke. The book describes the wider business implications of Cloud Computing with the promise of on-demand business innovation. It looks at how businesses trade differently on the web using mash-ups but also the challenges in managing more frequent change through social tools, and what happens when cloud comes into play in fully fledged operations. Andy was voted one of the top 25 most influential CTOs in the world in 2009 by InfoWorld and is grateful to readers of Computing Weekly who voted the Capgemini CTOblog the best Blog for Business Managers and CIOs each year for the last three years.
Solution to the problem with printing is more before the print button is hit and the mind set that paper in handy should be changed in the first place….so i think more than IT drive there should be a human drive or organizational drive like.”operation Green printing …might be some other .name…and some IT initiative to support….
My office is beside a printer and always wonder what would this guys do with the prints.
Hi Suneel
i agree its to do with the mindset that is still paper working, but its also to do with the processes too.
many of the current processes were designed at a time when solutions had to be paper based and this supports the mindset about taking them back into paper to examine the outputs etc.
i would worry more if new solutions developed for screeen based interactions are being printed!!
except somehow i suspect someone will tell me that there are people doing just this!
Hi Andy,
I completely agree,some of the most satisfing work I did were not very technical but it’s about same old process repeated with out applying mind.
1998 went to US to work for Railroad body.Weekly SAS reports were generated and send to 40+ partners printed on mainframe and posted for 19+ odd years.
Simple fix I did was to download into a doc and e mail them later this reports were posted on net for down load (all paper for last 10 years saved and am very satisfied about it)
The customer care tax dept was taking input on phone printing a report and faxing it to the client …..all it took is a simple online interface no prints/no fax this was done 4 years back …..
I think there is tons of paper thats not required to be printed………
Hope this post will start a process to re evalaute options where print can be saved..
Suneel…
hi Suneel
Sadly i reached the same conclusion earlier this year – the technology is not the issue in many of these areas, its how we can use it.
thats why my blogs in the second half of 2007 have been so strongly focussed on the trying to figure out the business value and use from the new technologies.
as i said somewhere else. get this part right and the rest will follow, meaning the new technologies will be ‘pulled’ into use by the demand created.
Suneel has a good point in that sometimes all it takes to eliminate a lot of hardcopy is for someone to say “do we really need to print this?” or, as Andy put it, is there “a better way of doing it in the first place?” but the root problem lies in the question: what happened to the paperless office?
Softcopy (SC) will not replace hardcopy (paper) until the ease-of-use of softcopy is better than that of hardcopy. While SC does some things better (text string search, for example), paper still has it beat in many ways. You can thumb through a paper book or report, fanning the pages, to find a diagram, a heading, or a page that you vaguely remember. That’s harder to do and much slower in SC. You can underline, highlight, or add comments on paper, but you can’t do that interactively in a PDF document (at least not with the ubiquitous free reader) or on web pages. You can do it in MS-Office documents if you have a copy, so there is progress being made.
Another key factor is availability. For a long time, most people had to be at their desktop to use SC. The proliferation of laptops and handhelds is changing that. You can now peruse SC on your sofa and take it with you into the kitchen to eat lunch. The penetration of these devices will influence the pace of the elimination of paper. In my family, everyone has a laptop and desktops are around in case one is needed; email is checked frequently and IM is used. I don’t print order confirmations for online shopping, I write them to PDFs or just leave the tab open until I receive the confirmation email. When I stay with my brother’s family, however, only his wife has a laptop and she only uses it for her job. She buys paper by the box and has a home office full of paper files.
When the walls and work surfaces of your house are displays, so you can read SC anywhere without having to carry a device with you, SC will replace paper. The change will be gradual in the macro arena, but rapid in pockets as organizations decide to make the change once the requisite technologies are in place.
have you seen the Microsoft ‘table’ which is a screen on which you can move around peices of ‘e-paper’ or spread them out to read them.
gets pretty close to your point
I think that whatever we can do to limit the amount of paper we use is going to make a big difference when it comes to going green and making it better for the environment. Every little bit is going to make a big change for our planet.
Whilst the every little bit helps rule works for us individually it is some what thought provoking how casually governments don’t seem to think actions through. The EU has decided that Anti Freeze cant be sold neat as for the last 100 years and must be sold diluted, this now means that we have added an entirely unnecessary doubling of the load to transport around – the original neat antifreeze plus its own weight in water – with the consequences to carbon as well as twice as much packaging etc!