These industry leaders represented a wide variety of commercial sectors, from manufacturing and banking to telecommunications, utilities, and more. Many respondents indicated they were focusing on IT standardization/simplification, IT transformation and agility, mobility, cloud technologies and other “buzzworthy” topics. Not surprisingly, leaders from different market sectors varied in their opinions of which IT initiatives may bring value to their own industries.
The Role of Print and Output Management
Relating their general thoughts about IT trends to the specific field of output management, the authors of the study state:
“An output management system is often considered middleware because it captures documents from applications running on various platforms and delivers them to a variety of hardcopy and softcopy destinations… In essence, it decouples many functions from the application and moves them into a device and platform-independent service layer (‘printing as a service’).”
This idea was borne out by the results of their survey. When asked about their own output management requirements, over three-fourths of the respondents answered “Integration with all Business Applications.” The responses varied somewhat, depending on whether or not organizations currently had a Managed Print Services (MPS) project in place. When it came to output and print management, the topics of platform independence, document security, and accounting/auditing, were also on the minds of CIOs and other decision-makers.
The full document spans more than 40 pages, and concludes with the concept of treating print and output management as a seamless, universal; “service layer” — a platform that enables document delivery from any application to any destination.
As explained in an earlier Blog post, LRS solutions support just such an approach. If you’d like to read the NEXTVALUE/CIONET research in its entirety, click here to download a copy of the report, titled “IT Transformation: The Challenge.”