Xerox Blogs

Paperless Office?

by Becky Dziedzic on behalf of Mike Moeller

Mike is taking a brief hiatus from Information Sanity. But the conversation doesn’t have to stop – help us keep it going with your comments, and we’ll do our part by sharing insights from others who are passionate about the topic.

To kick things off, check out Ashlee Vance’s blog at the New York Times from Oct. 7th. The post, and the person that commented on it, brings up a favorite topic of ours – one Mike hasn’t yet covered. The paperless office. We actually like to think of it as a “less-paper office.” Let’s face it, we’re Xerox, we’re not trying to get rid of paper altogether. We know you still like to save your receipts, we know you like a back-up copy of your healthcare forms, your bank statements, your legal documents, we know you still want to print your photos, we know direct mail campaigns can still generate twice the sales return of any other medium…and we still like to print it all. It’s still our core business.

But more than that, it’s our business to make it easier to get work done. So, when a hospital can save 15 percent in operating costs by converting 75 percent of its patient paperwork to digital, we’re going to help them do that. But we’re also going to help a small business like Watson Realty in Florida affordably print color documents to stand out in the stack of mail sitting on the countertop of potential clients.

Paperless Office? If you want. Less-Paper? Another step toward Information Sanity.

Economy? TIME TO HIRE!

Scott Titus

http://businesstodaync.com/economy.html Take a look at this front page! Our very own Fran Boling of Cornelius NC is featured in this article. CONGRATS FRAN ON A GREAT YEAR SO FAR AND FOR TAKING ADVANTAGE OF YOUR OPPORTUNITIES!

Xerox in Gartner's Managed Print Services Leaders Quadrant

Francois Ragnet

In the latest version of Gartner's Managed Print Service Quadrant, Xerox is positioned in the leaders quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. This is a owing to the Xerox Office Services offering, which helps your organization gain control of processes and costs for document output. Xerox manages all of your office printing devices – such as printers, copiers, and fax machines – regardless of manufacturer or model. Productivity, cost savings, but also carbon footprint keep improving through the continuous improvements that your fleet is undergoing. In other words, a key contributor to the Less Paper Office, which is supported by a mix of people, processes, and bleeding edge technologies, but also cool research like social networking for printers.

A Sustainable Business

Julian Troake

Most Financial Services companies are studying their impact on the environmnet and looking for ways to improve the sustainability of their business. Last December the American Banker wrote aboout how financial institutions can make green from being green. Cutting out waste and reducing power consumption can keep costs down and helping to improve the environment can improve good will amongst your customers. Now there is a new tool to help companies measure the impact that their office is having on the environment. Called the sustainability calculator it evaluates the office devices such as printers, copiers and multifunction devices and then identifies possible reduction of energy use, paper and solid waste etc. It's even more interesting to listen to a thought leader on the environment talk about how you can help make your business more sustainable.

Xerox Innovation Island on Real Biz in SL

Jonas Karlsson

Aaron Hunt, SMB Marketing Manager, did a "behind the scenes tour" of Xerox Innovation Island for SLCN's Real Biz in SL show. The interview was streamed live last Monday, and is now available for viewing in the SLCN archives. The tour gives a good sense of some of the ideas we have been playing with (though Aaron did a good job of steering the reporters away from the secret areas :-) ) so take a look if you're curious.

Showing the Wall o' Cool Places

I also want to highlight that while we've built stuff ourselves on the island (or commissioned others to build things for us), much of what is shown are freebies (including the large building shown towards the end of the tour) or things that we simply bought in-world. Being able to access the output of the SL creative community, really enables us to setup things like the orientation/game area very quickly.

The arm wrestling game is useful for socializing, teaching how to interact with objects in-world, and to resolve disputes.

Xerox Innovation Island is likely to remain accessible to Xerox employees only, so many thanks to Cybergrrl Oh and SLCN.tv for giving us this opportunity to show off our space!

China and Your Intellectual Property Risk

Lynette McTigue

As manufacturers continue to make investments overseas and integrate a global supply chain, intellectual property theft will remain a common issue. A recent article in the Economist highlights the significant increase in lawsuits in China for IP infringement. Over 15,000 lawsuits, up over 200% since 2003, are now active. China has made investments to improve the infrastructure within the Chinese judiciary system to handle this new surge in activity. However, the main beneficiary in this splurge continues to be Chinese lawyers, allowing a significant potential for continued corruption. The risks of intellectual property theft and counterfeiting have not stopped manufacturers from flocking to China in order to gain the benefits of the workforce and its low wages. As organizations continue to make these decisions, they will be forced to mitigate the IP theft risk. The Wall Street Journal suggests that the starting point to protecting yourself against the loss of intellectual property is to educate your employees. Intellectual property rules can be difficult to comprehend and the proper training and a well established IP security process can alleviate many issues. Unfortunately, most organizations do not have a trade secret management system in place that governs how employees handle IP information. In order to reduce the risk of intellectual property infringement companies will need to start effectively implementing such processes. Check out Xerox’ Thought Leader on Security - Dave Drab, CISSP. The whitepaper Enterprise Security – Tightening Your Grip on Trade Secrets outlines managing trade secrets for legal security. By applying the discipline of counterintelligence to their security model, manufacturers can more effective in managing trade secrets across the globe.

New Opportunities to Manage Overhead Costs

Susy Mark

McKinsey Quarterly just published an article titled “Managing Overhead Costs”. The message was clear. The high-tech had telecom industry is facing a prolonged period of extreme competition. This competitive pressure and the current economic conditions require business to implement a “new approach” to managing cost. Sustainable cost reduction should be targeted for the overhead functions i.e. finance, HR, IT and legal. Some interesting statistics were shared. From 230 S& P 500 companies that publicly announced cost reduction programs only 10% succeeded in maintaining their improvement in cost over 2 years. And only 25% of the companies expanded their business while improving their margins. One of the cost programs that produced sustainable cost savings over 3 years included IT Outsourcing. As I read CIO Magazine, E-Week, and some of Gartner’s recent publications a common theme for 2008 is cost management. I support McKinsey's focus on longer term programs, outsourcing as a vehicle, and targeting overhead functions because programs supported by process, metrics and contractual obligations tend to deliver sustainable results compared with episodic actions. Cost out initiatives are not new news to IT, Finance, Legal, and HR. However, there are new ways to find millions in savings in these areas; one new way is to outsource document processes related to these functions. Not only can you control cost but you can also look for new ways to expand your business. Here are some thought starters on Document Outsourcing.

Welcome to the new blogs.xerox.com

admin

We've made a few changes by now having individual blogs for our Xerox bloggers. Each blogger now has their own URL. Please take a look at our growing list of blogs at blogs.xerox.com.