Reduce the burden of print, and make IT more innovative
by Ken Weilerstein
As technology continues to advance, more pressure is put on IT departments to support a wider variety of business objectives. In “The Changing Role of IT in the Future of Business,” Daniel Newman notes, “IT departments are experiencing tremendous changes as their roles expand to impact customer service, sales, and even business strategies. As a result, organizations are increasingly turning IT into a driving force in all aspects of business.”1
In fact, organizations now view IT as a driving force of innovation — today, IT departments are expected to be more versatile and agile when it comes to using new technologies that can help companies take advantage of growth opportunities. Unfortunately, even when IT departments manage and maintain an on-premises print infrastructure and are responsible for the day-to-day demands of maintaining and supporting their printers, they're expected to work on strategic business objectives at the same time, and usually without an increase in head count.
Moving your print infrastructure to the cloud can free up IT resources, letting you utilize them to support more value-driven business goals.
Most IT departments would welcome a more efficient approach to print management. However, many are reluctant to begin the work it would take to optimize their infrastructure, which includes:
All of this time and effort doesn’t even begin to cover other tasks that come with maintaining a local print infrastructure — like resetting print queues and rebooting print servers. When printing issues demand the attention of managers, you start to realize that offloading print management to the cloud may be a better option.
Without the need to manage print, IT employees have more time to enhance and expand their skill sets so they can support a larger variety of business objectives. According to Newman, “Reskilling existing teams will be necessary to maintain agility, so it’s important to construct a team of employees who can handle the peaks and valleys of business.”2 In other words, your IT employees need time to train on new technologies so they can continuously become more capable of supporting business strategies.
By reducing company owned-and-operated print assets, you free up funds that can be used for more strategic business purposes. In fact, many enterprises have already saved on printing costs by systematically optimizing the printers themselves — but they tend to spend more on print management software. Moving the responsibility offsite to a pay-as-you go cloud service is an easy way to reduce the cost of this software. Plus, the money you save can help your IT managers meet cost-cutting objectives or help pay for skunkworks projects that bring innovative ideas to fruition.
If you are open to new ways to reduce your responsibility for managing print, Ricoh can help you do this with RICOH Print Platform Cloud Service — a scalable, fully-managed cloud environment that provides a consistent user experience, can easily grow with your company and offers an easy-to-manage, monthly per-user subscription fee.
1 Daniel Newman, "The Changing Role Of IT In The Future Of Business" Forbes, July 26, 2016.
2 Daniel Newman, "The Changing Role Of IT In The Future Of Business" Forbes, July 26, 2016.
Print Platform Management Services are essential in today's fast-changing business environment. Are you overlooking any areas in your print infrastructure that could benefit from a cloud-first strategy?
