If you are reading this now, chances are you understand the value of being able to deliver critical business documents in a reliable, secure manner. The question is: what brought you to this page today, and why have you decided to spend your time reading about this topic?
An optimist might guess that you are proactively looking to put in place a robust, flexible enterprise output management (EOM) infrastructure able to evolve and accommodate future changes in your business and technology environment. A more pessimistic (and perhaps more realistic) thought is that you are facing serious challenges right now – today – because someone in your organization’s past failed to take that more proactive approach a long time ago.
The reality is that every decision we make is in the here and now and building an output management infrastructure is often an afterthought. Typically, when there’s a current need, fixing that need is the focus with little or no attention to future goals.
For organizations short on time, money, and staff, focusing on today’s needs may help you more quickly address pressing document delivery issues affecting users and applications. This can get you a quick win, which everybody likes, and you might reap some useful cost benefits. The downside of a short-term focus is that the solution you put in place might not adapt to the needs of tomorrow, initial cost benefits may fade over time, and that the solution may require much more time, money, and staff when it no longer serves your needs. Murphy’s Law says this will happen at the worst possible time.
On the other hand, taking a long-term approach has its own advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, you are less likely to be blindsided in the future by technical and/or business changes that your document infrastructure cannot support. But building in flexibility and scalability sometimes means higher up-front costs that are hard to sell internally. Your fancy EOM infrastructure may be able to easily quadruple in size or instantly accommodate a completely new fleet of printers and MFPs from any hardware manufacturer. However, if you never experience dramatic business growth (for example, as a result of a merger) or make wholesale changes to your printer fleet, you may find yourself the proud owner of an “overengineered” EOM environment.
The best approach to begin building a new output management solution or fixing the current one, lies somewhere between the former and latter approaches, in the area where business advantages and potential risk overlap. Where the benefits of simplicity and scalability are weighed against the costs and likelihood of having to start again from scratch.
When it comes to weighing short- and long-term benefits, being honest about your current environment is crucial. Does your existing output management solution meet the current needs of your business? Are there any major technology or business initiatives on the horizon (for example, moving key applications to the cloud, adopting a remote/hybrid/RTO workplace, embracing Zero-Trust security, etc.) that your EOM solution will have to support? If your answer to the former part of this question is No, it’s likely that your current EOM solution won’t support those future initiatives. Choosing a new EOM solution is crucial.
A little about myself: I have not always worked for LRS. Until a few years ago, I was a Technology Manager for one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world and was responsible for building their global output management solution. After a couple of years of expanding and scaling the existing EOM infrastructure globally to 300 servers, we realized that only some of our current needs aren’t being met and any future needs won’t be supported. It was time to find new EOM solution.
Armed with several years’ worth of “lessons learned”, we had the knowledge needed to identify the core technology and build the global enterprise solution our business users demanded. As we evaluated our current environment, the following criteria became critical for our next EOM solution:
- Ability to scale to meet the needs of the global enterprise
- High availability and redundancy supported by load balancer support
- A printer-agnostic approach that would allow us to switch hardware vendors as pricing and capabilities change over time
- Centralized and distributed technology support
- Support for secure printing and secure scanning operations for data protection
When choosing a new provider and their EOM solution, it’s important that you’ve evaluated your environment, and you can provide what an enterprise design looks like. Before soliciting input from potential providers, this design should focus on your company’s current goals and objectives as well any future initiatives. Provide this design to the potential providers and have them tell you how their solution can deliver on your goals. Allow them to adjust your design, but make sure your company’s goals & objectives (G&Os) aren’t compromised.
Once you choose your provider and their solution, then your updated design can be used as the starting point to build your enterprise solution. In our case, we chose LRS and their Output Management solution because they checked all our boxes, and they provided my company with that highly available, globally scalable solution that met my company’s G&Os.
Building an enterprise global output management solution is complicated, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It is critically important to take your time, be honest with yourself, and select the best Output Management provider to meet your foreseeable needs.
Feel free to contact me if you’d like to discuss any aspects of this post or if you’d like assistance in designing an EOM solution that’s “just right” for your current and future needs.