IT Integration Need Not Be Time Consuming, Complex And Costly
Clare Want, 23/06/2010, posted in "Analysis"
Clare Want was appointed as Marketing Director for Canon Business Solutions, UK & Ireland, in July 2008 having amassed 20 years of consumer marketing experience, predominantly in over-the-counter consumer ...more info
Clare Want was appointed as Marketing Director for Canon Business Solutions, UK & Ireland, in July 2008 having amassed 20 years of consumer marketing experience, predominantly in over-the-counter consumer healthcare brands. Clare is responsible for delivering marketing campaigns for direct and indirect routes to market and heads up a team of approximately 50 marketing professionals reporting directly to the UK & Ireland Managing Director. Her key focus is on helping to develop customer propositions for Canon’s market leading business solutions to ensure the company’s continued success in key business and public sector markets. Before joining Canon, Clare was a Global Marketing Director at Johnson & Johnson and previously held the position at Pfizer Consumer Healthcare before it was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2006. In her career, Clare has also held various roles including Director, Central and Eastern Europe at Pfizer, Commercial Director and Business Development Manager at Warner Lambert as well as Group Marketing Manager for Penguin biscuits at McVITIE’s. ...less info
As business becomes global, organisations are embracing more collaborative working practices and as a result, more integrated IT solutions. Most organisations are already aware of the benefits of having an integrated IT system.
It enables employees to access files and documents from multiple locations, creating a genuinely virtual workforce. For IT managers it centralises maintenance, making it easier to manage the network and for finance directors and senior management, it costs less.
However, recent research from Vanson Bourne highlights that almost half of companies (48%) see IT integration as the biggest challenge faced by their organisation in 2010. While Senior Management sees the need for IT integration and the benefits it can bring, they don’t always fully understand how to implement it into the disparate systems of an organisation.
Pragmatic approach to change
Effective IT integration is a challenge for all organisations. This difficulty is compounded by the current economic climate. Despite optimism slowly returning to European businesses and many countries starting to recover from months of recession, organisations are understandably continuing to look for ways to cut-costs across their business, which inevitably puts pressure on the IT budget.
While this is not the time to be making sweeping changes, dramatically cutting IT spend isn’t going to help in the long run. As Datamonitor highlights in a recent whitepaper, organisations need to take a pragmatic approach to change, which means making small but impactful improvements rather than overhauling entire IT systems.
An economic downturn can actually help focus organisations to streamline processes and make sure workforces are operating efficiently. As markets pick up, now is the perfect opportunity to put in place systems that provide a framework for future growth. Calculated and strategic investments that deliver a clear return on investment could ensure that organisations are in as strong a position as possible as Europe enters a period of economic growth. By integrating efficient, cost effective and scalable solutions into current IT systems, companies will be free to focus on growing their core operations as the economy picks up and demand begins to grow.
Print management is a relatively new area for many people who work in IT and there is the perception that any changes to the print network will require a complicated, time-consuming and costly upgrade of the IT network. However, this is not the case. Print technology can now be easily integrated into an existing IT network enabling the IT Manager to manage the print network centrally and administer it more easily.
Crucially, new print solutions will integrate with existing technologies and with any future investments. IT managers need to see the management of the print function as less of an administrative burden and more as a real opportunity to contribute to the business’s bottom line through more efficient processes and heightened staff productivity.
Hot-desking and remote working
The impact of cost-cutting measures are being felt beyond the IT department. Changes are being made across the board as organisations seek to reduce costs. We are travelling less and in many cases, job roles are being consolidated as organisations seek to get more value from their current employees. As individuals work more flexibly and take on wider responsibilities, working processes such as hot-desking come into play.
One day a week an employee may need to sit with a different team within the office, or indeed in a different location all together, but still need to access documents and files on the network, as well as the printer. Integrated software enables each user to log-on to any device with their own ID and password, so an organisation’s information essentially ‘travels’ with employees depending on their location and is kept secure.
As well as facilitating hot-desking and remote working, effective integration also allows employees to easily collaborate on projects. Documents can be saved on a central server in such a way that users who are logged-in to the corporate network can access those documents securely from any location. The next step is to look at integrating printers into the IT network so that they become part of the document workflow.
Security matters
Security is a principle concern for all organisations and especially those in industries that handle sensitive information such as finance, legal or government sectors. Integrating new technologies invariably raises concerns about compromising security. In the case of PwC, the organisation had an individual printer on every desk as managers, understandably, didn’t want confidential, sensitive information printed and left lying around the office.
Some employees already have RFID identity cards to access their building with embedded the security technology on these cards. Employees are able to use their current RFID cards to access their personal print queue and documents on any MFP and no one else can access their documents. This is a great example of IT integration in action; using what is already available rather than investing in additional, new, technology and delivering an impactful new solution.
Ultimately integration is about IT systems working seamlessly together without the end-user really even noticing. Integration is set to be a key IT buzzword in 2010 and should not be seen as a passive, one-way connection, but an interaction between systems; for example between the printer and the network. Users are sharing information in both directions, as well as changing that information and passing it on again.
The effective integration of print and document management systems demonstrates how large national and international organisations can support their wide-spread and mobile workforce. It enables employees to do their job more efficiently and from almost any location, and it offers them the peace of mind that they are able to maintain the same high levels of security even when information can be accessed from outside the office.
IT integration need not be time-consuming, complex and costly. It doesn’t have to be a question of overhauling the entire network and starting again but working within current IT frameworks. IT integration offers centralised maintenance, allows users to collaborate and streamlines working processes delivering a more efficient IT infrastructure and a more productive workforce – which if implemented correctly, is something which IT managers deserve recognition for.
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