In last week’s installment, I discussed how business are leveraging cloud initiatives to address marketplace needs quickly, efficiently, and at a lower cost. Together, the three cloud approaches — SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS — make up a “stack” of services representing an important layer of your IT environment. But how do you ensure the information generated by cloud services will actually reach your employees and other business stakeholders? That’s where a robust output management layer comes in.
Why should you think about output management when undertaking business transform initiatives such as cloud computing? To answer that key question, let’s start with the benefits/outcomes that businesses are trying to achieve. According to KPMG’s 2014 Cloud Survey report, the following list represents the top ways that businesses are using cloud computing to drive business/IT transformation:
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Drive cost efficiencies
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Better enable the mobile workforce
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Improve alignment with customers and partners
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Better leverage data to provide insight
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New product development and innovation
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Develop new business models
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Shift to a global shared services model
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Faster time to market
In addition to KPMG’s findings, consider IBM’s view on the benefits of adopting a cloud model for the enterprise:
- Achieve maximum flexibility
- Establish process standardization governance and compliance
- Lower labor costs (e.g., configuration, operations, management and monitoring)
- Deploy services with greater speed and at lower cost
- Improve application quality through enhanced testing
- Improve the quality of service experience for end users
Pretty similar perspectives. Now, consider the benefits that businesses can realize by taking a holistic approach to output management to drive business/IT transformation. IDC recently published a workbook document, sponsored by LRS, titled “Better Business Outcomes with Holistic Output Management”, where some of the benefits of a standardized print service layer are listed, such as:
- Delivers hardware and software cost savings by consolidating and eliminating print servers
- Lowers labor costs (e.g., configuration, operations, support, management and monitoring)
- Delivers new services faster without the cost and risk of application changes
- Reduces print failures in document-related business processes that impact business performance
- Supports IT standardization via a single, platform-independent print service architecture for the entire enterprise
- Improve employee mobility, productivity, and satisfaction by providing a consistent user experience and functional capabilities for all employees, independent of application or computing platform
- Improve security, reduce risk, and ensure compliance with audit, accounting and reporting capabilities
- Support sustainability efforts by reducing unwanted/wasted printing and enabling electronic delivery of application output
- Enables business process automation and optimization through intelligent document bundling, eliminating the need for costly and error-prone manual processes
Do you see any similarities between the benefits of holistic output management and cloud computing vis-à-vis business/IT transformation? Sure, some of the words and phrases are a little different, but many concepts are strikingly similar. You can just as easily summarize the key benefits of holistic output management as follows:
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Drive cost efficiencies
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Better enable the mobile workforce
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Support new product development and innovation
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Achieve maximum flexibility
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Establish process standardization governance and compliance
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Deploy services with greater speed and at lower cost
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Improve the quality of service experience for end users
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Improve security, reduce risk, and ensure compliance
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Enable business process automation and optimization
In a nutshell, LRS provides middleware that captures and delivers documents from all applications and platforms to a variety of hardcopy and softcopy destinations. As far as LRS is concerned, public, private and hybrid clouds are just additional platforms, where applications may reside that create output for distribution.
Since many enterprises are focused on providing “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS) or “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) capabilities, why not include an output management service layer in your target offering? It offers a highly scalable architecture that is hardware agnostic relative to computing platforms and printer hardware, providing tremendous flexibility in application development, testing and deployment and future IT decision making.
So, whether you are evaluating cloud technologies, IT transformation, or both, you should carefully consider the synergistic benefits of the LRS Enterprise Output Server. It will provide the print infrastructure you need to achieve the ultimate objective – real business transformation! It will also make life much easier for your IT staff.