Today, printers are used in most (if not almost all) office environments, and in a lot of homes. Office employees often rely on being able to print to do their jobs. However, for people managing the printers, most of their tasks are related to annoying day-to-day issues rather than setting up and managing a companywide print management policy. Some people even think that printers are sent from hell.
Let's talk to Peter Schneider and Erik Norell, the founders of Cirrato, about the history and view of strategic print management.
Q: Tell us about the differences in how print management was viewed twenty years ago compared to now.
A: To be honest, people always thought that printing was boring and ‘unsexy’. Earlier, the facility managers, more often than IT departments, were in charge of managing printers and making sure they worked and even repairing them to some level. The only thing the IT department did was adding the queues. They weren’t interested in doing the ‘boring’ work.
Over time, the responsibility moved from facility management to IT. Today, it is usually the IT departments that make sure that printer and copy machines are installed and configured correctly, run efficiently in the network, that there is enough paper and toners, and of course supporting end users. Unfortunately, many people still find print management pretty boring. This is something we wanted to change, hence we designed our print management tool to automate the "operational" tasks and lifting print management to a more strategic level.
Q: Why is print management perceived that way?
A: Well, how would you like to spend hours on updating printer drivers just to make something as simple as “being able to print” work? Or take hundreds of calls suddenly when a print spool server stops working? This is what we mean by "non-strategic" print management.
And a lot of the times, the problems may not even be related to the printers themselves. It may be something in the IT infrastructure backend, or settings in the users computers. But it is easy to blame the printers and the IT guy who set them up.
What is needed in most companies is a way to make such "operational" problems disappear, and instead a way to give managers a way to manage hundreds or thousands of printers on a more strategic level. Then suddenly it becomes interesting for them again, since they can save money and make the end users work environment more efficient.
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