PRINT.IT
17
OPINION
Managing printing better represents
a significant opportunity for
organisations to save on operational
expenses estimated to be as much
as 5% of their IT budget. However,
controlling this cost is not without
its challenges, especially when it
involves changing the behaviour of
an IT savvy workforce.
Traditional approaches involve
controlling printing in a physical or a
fiscal way, saving paper and toner by
changing printers’ default settings
to duplex and draft quality; cross
charging departments a per page
usage fee; automatically deleting
printer queues; and so called ‘pull
printing,’ requiring end users to key
in a PIN code on the printer itself
to save wastage and add a level of
security.
The issue here is that all this is
at odds with an end user’s desire
to print, and it doesn’t address the
core reason of why people want
to print, or provide a reasonable
alternative. This results in a
classic displacement effect as the
problem goes underground in the
form of shadow IT, a proliferation of
personal printers and the unintended
consequence of higher costs and
less control.
Why print?
Why do people print at work? We see
three main use cases: printing to
edit, printing to read and printing to
share documents.
Printing to edit
: an end user is in the
middle of editing a large document
and it becomes too cumbersome to
track changes and compare versions,
so they decide to print it out,
glancing at the printed copy whilst
making changes on the screen.
Printing to read
: people print
documents because they prefer the
clarity of reading a hard copy.
Printing to share
: an end user is
about to go to a meeting and wants
to make sure everyone is on the
‘same page’, literally, so they print
out copies of their presentation or
of the document to be discussed for
every attendee at the meeting.
With the proliferation of mobile
devices, printing to share has
become less prominent. Today, it’s
easy to bring a phone or tablet to a
meeting, but printing to read and edit
remains widespread.
Insight
End User IT Analytics is all about
monitoring the IT infrastructure from
the end user perspective and the
insight it brings about how end users
are really experiencing IT, irrespective
of what the service desk is reporting.
One application of this technology
is in end user workspace design.
The operational data it provides,
such as workload trends and usage
metrics about how services are being
consumed, enables organisations
to design optimal service for a given
use case.
When organisations have an IT
analytics solution in place, they start
asking questions such as ‘What
metrics could we use to better
understand the relationship between
a particular workspace design and
printing behaviour?’.
Given the use cases of printing to
read and printing to edit, reasonable
metrics might include ‘end users with
more than one monitor’ or ‘end users
with a high resolution monitor’ and
‘number of pages printed per day’.
This is presented in one of the
out-of-the-box dashboards shown
below.
What this dataset shows is that
end users who have either a second
monitor or a high resolution monitor
print less than those who don’t.
So armed with the insight and
knowledge gained from these
analytics, organisations can now
construct a solid business case to
make a targeted intervention (i.e.
purchase additional or new monitors
for specific end users), and do this
with absolute certainty of both
reducing costs and improving the
overall end user experience.
Mark Boggia is Director Sales
Engineering Europe at Nexthink, a
specialist in end user analytics. He
has over 20 years’ sales experience
in infrastructure software, gained in
start-ups, tier 1 software vendors and
channel partners. Based in Nexthink’s
UK office in Farnborough, Mark is
responsible for Nexthink’s sales
engineering team in Europe. Prior
to joining Nexthink, he was EMEA
Director of Solution Consulting at
ServiceNow. He has also held senior
sales engineering leadership positions
at BMC Software and Symantec. Mark
holds a B.Sc. (Hons) from Kingston
University and an MBA from The Open
University.
Mark Boggia explains how end user
analytics can help businesses reduce
print volumes without inconveniencing
employees
You Spend How
Much on Printing?!
Controlling costs
is not without
its challenges,
especially
when it involves
changing the
behaviour of
an IT savvy
workforce
Mark Boggia,
Director Sales
Engineering
Europe,
Nexthink
