We continue our three part series on Managed Print Services: the Theory, the Tools, and the Targets. Today we will focus upon the tools at a dealers disposal.

Managed Print Services, or MPS as it is referred to, is as much art as it is science. As of yet, customers do not fully understand it, and the scary thing is that there are very few solutions providers that do either. Moreover, we will discuss some of the pro’s and con’s present in the vendor, partner, and consultant spaces today.

With over 4.6 trillion pages printed per year by U.S. offices alone (source), pundits and neophytes alike believe MPS to be the next ‘big thing’. Dealers are pinning their hopes that MPS success will restore gross profit to the balance sheet in an industry marked with year over year declines in margins.

The Consultants:

Is it snake-oil or success their selling? Truth be told these folks are the proverbial sales person’s sales person. Each has their varying techniques and slick talk-tracks, but the consultant selling MPS is a special breed, indeed. At present there are only a handful whose names are synonymous in the industry with MPS.

To be entirely fair, consultants - well, savvy consultants - listen to the desires of their clients. As such, I have the impression their customer bases are clamoring for advice on how to rollout MPS strategies. However, I’m not entirely sure if most of the hype is fueled by the consultation industry, the manufacturers or the dealers.

As a customer of these consultants, a dealer principal must be aware of reputation and a proven track record. The consultant is selling knowledge and observations accumulated through working with other dealers - so you are essentially paying for the distilled do’s and do not’s.

Be careful here because the rubber only meets the road if you are willing to understand the concepts and theories behind selling MPS, as well as adapt those theories to 1) your culture and 2) your marketplace. Without this willingness to commit, you are dead before you leave the gate.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

The Programs:

I have been contacted by just about every company out there trying to sell me and my company the essential toolkit to tackle MPS.

1. Manufactures and Value-Added Resellers (VARs) try to push their angle so you will sell more of their product.
2. Software companies try to sell you the analysis and sales training necessary to win the assessment and place your desired hardware.
3. Toner manufactures are either underwriting some program through co-op funding or outright selling their solution to help you sell their toner.
4. … and even the consultants have their favorites.

While this is all natural here is what you have to remember when thinking about doing business with one or many of these types of providers:

1. Be honest with what kind of company and culture you have: Can  you sell applications or are you slinging boxes?
2. Have a vision of where you want to be in 5 years: This is not a short hitch if you are to make money.
3. Know whether you want a franchise or a steakhouse: Do you want the whole package gift wrapped and put in your lap or are you willing to build a quality organization?
4. What returns and resources can your providers provide and promise?
5. Talk to references you trust before the handshake.

Have the right tools for the job at hand.

The Software:

The software centered around MPS comes in 2 distinct flavors these days: sales data gathering/fleet management and proposal generation/total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis.

First, the data gathering tools are a critical piece of the much talked-around document assessment or print management study. These come in various flavors from a small USB key that quickly captures an inventory and equipment volume count to the much more elaborate full deployment model of server and client based assessment packages.

The fleet management tools are quickly becoming essential to cost-effectively maintain the growing number of fleets. There is a land grab under place in this industry, and every vector is angling to find a way to protect their core business by rolling out fleet management strategies. Your choice in partners here will dictate long-term success or failure as consolidation in this space is inevitable.

Second, The sales proposal generation and TCO analysis tools come in a variety of flavors. Most work well for their intended purposes, but I will share with you from personal experience that the main obstacle is your account management team’s resistance to adopt a different working pattern.

While all of these are valuable in various instances, the critical mistake you should make is that the software tools will magically show you the path to enlightenment and how to make an obscene amount of money while saving the customer 70% of their operating costs in the next 6 months. They won’t.

Imagine the document assessment being the surveying and architectural process, whereby the outocome is to build a house of strategy for your customer. In essence, these tools simply frame windows in the customer’s house. It is up to your account management team to determine how the house should best be furnished in accordance with the customer’s strategic desires and needs.

The Resources:

Having trusted resources is important, for dealer and customer alike. Outside of finding those industry colleagues you can bug and consultants have to pay, there are a few resources online to help with Managed Print Services. Additionally, if you sign-up with various MPS providers, you should ensure their information is relevant and can be used for both internal sales awareness as well as sales literature for your customer base.

Past this, there are some other resources like Gartner and Photizo Group that can useful in attempting to compile information. Additionally, various industry organizations like IBPI, BTA, and CDA can be of service if you are a member.

Opportunity Abounds but Success can be Elusive:

True success is hard to come by in the MPS space. The competition is coming at you from everywhere:

• Manufacturers, VARs, the Internet, and even the two-man operation down the street can compete.
• Margins are extremely thin on supplies if you do not have the proper relationships or partnership-levels established.
• Customers are becoming more educated with each successive generation of renewals.

The success of your company can depend on whether you embrace this fleet-centric (and almost device agnostic) opportunity as a core component of your mainstay business. With over 4.6 trillion pages being printed by U.S. companies alone, only an estimated 3% are considered covered by a fleet management strategy.

Opportunities abound, but make no mistake about it, there is a land grab going on and if you don’t position properly you’ll be left out in the wind without a stake in the ground.

Up Next: We discuss what targets are popular and which are profit-suckers.

Update: Greg over at Death of the Copier wrote two great follow-up articles to some crucial tools I had misclassified - The Interview and The Six Inches

Update: Read the entire series.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

Does your rule to deal with a single occurrence of misdeed adversely affect the other 99% of your customers?

How many of you have experienced the broad hand of “justice” due to a fellow associates selfish behavior? Have you not felt slighted because of a broad and over-arching policy that restricts everyone due to a few people’s negligence?

Now, think of how your customers feel when you implement broad and sweeping ”policies” because of one moment of pain or exposure.

It is easy to become myopic - and see only the pain inflicted by one instance of wrong-doing.

In business we must resist striking hard and fast rules due to a moment of pain; we must forcibly calm ourselves and step away from the situation to allow our mind an opportunity to calm down, relax, and regain perspective.

All to often we find ourselves reacting to a situation rather than planning on how to proactively avoid it. Surely, sometimes painful or difficult tasks cannot be avoided - only endured. However, throughout the experience we must maintain our sights upon the greater vision of our goal; If we focus too intently upon the hurdle right in front of us we may just miss where to place our foot on the other side.

By maintaining the obstacle in front of us in the peripheral of our mind’s eye and focusing on the goal ahead of us can we prevent ourselves from be pulled back into the daily grind of act-and-react so many in Corporate Americans fail to see past - and help us keep the relative stress at bay.

So next time you are tempted to jump the gun and react - remember, your ability to clearly perceive the issue at hand and decide upon an appropriate response is a clear indication of your character as a person.

Do not allow this moment to define you, but allow yourself to define this as your moment.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

Today we start our three part series on Managed Print Services: the Theory, the Tools, and the Targets.

Managed Print Services, or MPS as it is referred to, is as much art as it is science. As of yet, customers do not fully understand it, and the scary thing is that there are very few solutions providers that do either.

According to pundits and neophytes alike, MPS has garnered a special place among those in the output industry. Everyone hails it as the next ‘big thing’ that will yield buckets full of money in an industry marked with year over year declines in margins.

Indeed, properly managed right-sizing initiatives can be very profitable and save a customer a good deal of money over alternatives. How can someone deliver on revenue for one while showing savings for another?

Let us examine some of the theory behind why a company would venture into review of MPS in the first place.

1. The traditional copier fleet has found its way on to the wire and the space for document output has become crowded in a “me-too” frenzy of ’speeds and feeds’ (and industry term used to describe a cost-minus sales approach).
2. There is a huge collision between the space of the traditional copier/mfp manufacturers of the world (Xerox, Canon, Sharp, Ricoh, Konica, Kyocera, etc.) and the printer manufacturers of the world (HP, Lexmark, etc.).

Given these dynamics and the complexity of these devices’ feature sets, more and more often IT is being asked to manage the device fleet. And what does IT do better than almost any other organization within the business - identify and implement processes through standardization.

…stud[ies] shows that decision making for MPS agreements is driven by the IT organization over 60% of the time. In many cases, the traditional copier decision makers (purchasing, facilities management, and operations) are ‘losing out’ in the internal struggle to control the hard copy device fleet (the collective group of copiers, printers, and MFP’s which reside in most organizations). - Ed Crowley, CEO of The Photizo Group

Savvy “copier dealers” and “printing VARs” alike are rushing headlong into their version of MPS - trying to put their spin, trying to evangelize customers, trying to win the land grab!

What makes a sound partner yesterday still makes a sound partner today:

Managing printers is not a new thing. IT has been doing it for decades now - and HP has been helping customers do it some fashion or another. The trend now is to right-size your fleet of output devices and lower operating costs across the board.

Many statistics point to the majority of document costs being in the related costs area - not in the fleet acquisition or actual realization of the document on the output device. One big area network administrators can speak to is the rampant number of calls they receive on printing related issues, for instance. I know I can.

With trends in outsourcing over the last decade, CFO’s and CIO’s alike are looking for ways to help their balance sheet. Does offloading an unattractive portion of the P&L to a strategic partner make sense? Couple this with the ability to refresh the technology, control your costs, and  throw in an economic downturn, now you have a boiling pot of water ready for the chef. It’s what they call a classic ‘win-win’.

Strategy not tragedy:

However, many customers remain uneducated on what they are spending and what a properly equipped partner can bring to the table.

As with any opportunity there are many “fly-by-night” operations, and it behooves the client to educate themselves on options, and just what their prospective partner’s definition of MPS actually is. As they say, “The Devil is in the details.”

Customers can avoid many unpleasant situations by simply reading the contract and asking pointed questions. Crowley also points out that many organizations go through phases of learning what they want, so there appears to be some education in the negotiations as well:

Another finding from the study relates to how the components of MPS contracts tend to change as decision makers gain more experience. This is driven by changing expectations as decision makers gain experience with MPS and begin to raise their expectations beyond simply gaining control of the fleet to actually optimizing the fleet, and eventually, enhancing the firm’s business processes by adding new fleet and document management / workflow capabilities.

With all of that said, a blossoming opportunity remains on the forefront of both vendor and customer alike.

Up Next: we discuss the various software tools used in helping companies manage their fleets.

Update: Read the entire series.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

Do you ever feel a little overwhelmed - or a lot? Do the mountains of to-do’s seem overwhelming or the projects seem daunting?

Sanity comes from being able to maintain productivity in highly demanding environments. If you wonder about the magic of how people take on huge projects and complete them so effortlessly, there is a simple secret:

Take it apart and distill the “goal” or “project” down into easily achievable parts or milestones. This has two overall positive results:

1. Sense of accomplishment: You feel like you are really in a zone of productivity when you can check off item after item you have completed.
2. Ensures project success: By completing each milestone you take one step close to completing your quest and diffuse possible obstacles to success.

However, one key component of the “break-down” is that you maintain your milestones in relation to your overall vision. That is, all of your roads (milestones) must lead you to Rome (your goal).

You’ve got to think about the big things while you’re doing the small things, so that the small things go in the right direction. - Alivin Toffler

All too often, in a project and in life, we allow ourselves to lose focus of our vision and focus on the problems at hand. This causes us to replace our original goal with a smaller much less meaningful goal that was originally a milestone - a  stepping stone in our project.

Only when we practice overcoming our milestone tasks in the context of achieving our grander plan, do we truly progress towards a path of accomplishment.

PS - a friend of mine over at KnowTheNetwork had some tips.

What tips do you have?

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

Last Friday, my 5 month old 52″ HD plasma television started acting really strange. I could turn power on and off, but I couldn’t select any other inputs nor could I adjust volume.

Rule number 1: pull power from wall… didn’t work.

Rule number 2: concede defeat and call tech support.

So I called Circuit City’s technical support line, which of course was closed, and then I tried calling Panasonic’s technical support line and they were also closed. I suppose watching a DVD on the ole’ laptop wasn’t so bad.

Saturday:

Called technical support with Panasonic and received word the issue was evidently firmware related. Now for all of you old timers out there, did you know televisions now have microprocessors and firmware? I’m used to this on computers and copiers, but not televisions. Will the wonders never cease.

I digress. They decided to mail me firmware. This would take a week to reach me… not good, but a decent fall back option if I run into problems.

Monday:

I’m over the fact that I couldn’t achieve technical support instant gratification, and called Circuit City’s technical support line one more time. I got a scheduler on the line, and someone was to be dispatched to my house on Thursday.

We are moving up in the world at least.

Wednesday:

Get a call from the proprietor of the local servicing agency and we talk through some things. He kindly offers to run out because he thinks it should be a 5 minute fix to re-flash the firmware.

The Cavalry Arrive:

The same gentlemen I spoke with pulls up driving a really big, red truck. He comes to the door wearing thick, square glasses and talked with a heavy southern accent. Seemed like a really nice guy.

He pulls out his paperwork with the SD card and walks over to the television. He stoops over to put the SD card in the slot, stops, and leans in closer. He looks back at me, and then again at the small slot in the front of the television.

He stands up, and looks at me and asks if I know how a quarter might have gotten put in the slot.

Ahh, the love of a child…

As he proceeded to clear the jam and hand me the quarter, I thanked him profusely for his visit, realizing he didn’t have to cover the problem under warranty.

I called my daughter down and begin to calmly explain the situation. She of course looks puzzled and asks, “It’s not a piggy bank?”

Well, if it is, that is the most expensive piggy bank I’ve ever seen. I will tell you all friends, the price of a quarter went way up.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

Reminiscent of a Dr. Seuss meets Tim Burton interface, Plurk gets a big plug from some A-listers and takes off with fans and foes alike.

For those of you that have been watching the web for the past few days, a new social site has gained in popularity thanks to Leo and Scoble called Plurk. Plurk has seemingly begun to step in where Twitter has begun to falter under scalability issues. While it is not without its problems, it seems to offer a richer user interface (UI) along with some nice hooks, like Karma (discussed a little later).

Where did the name Plurk come from you ask? Well, akan from the Plurk Blog had this to say:

Plurk. Yuck. Sounds so muck like pork. or bork. We understand there’s sort of a love-hate thing going on with our name. It’s understandable but we’d like to give you some colour on what’s behind the name so you are not as quick to brush it off.

• Plurk as stalkerati central: People + Lurk= Plurk
• Plurk as an amalgam of Play + Work: Play-Work. Plurk is what scientists do. It is the enthusiastic, energetic application of oneself to the task at hand as a child excitedly plays; it is the intense arduous, meticulous work of an artist on their life-long masterpiece; it is joyful work. (credit)
• Plurk as acronym: Peace, Love, Unity, Respect, Karma
• Verb potential: “Oh I googled this –> Oh I plurked it” Easy enough to wrap around in any form. Plurked, plurking, plurkers, plurks. Little p, big P, it’s catchy, snippy and sweet.

So next time you say Plurk, don’t say ewww, but chew on it for a little longer and have a happy day (at work, plurking the day away!).

An Overview:

Plurk is organized in a timeline format and threaded comments, or Plurks. Twitter, however is organized in a sequential format and only provides a first-in-first-out (FIFO) format for messages. The “river” allows you to scroll through a time line of conversations and expand each thread to view other “plurkers” comments.

What is interesting about the posts is that they are comprised of several key components:

1. Avatar - A picture to add some flavor and a nice way to filter only your posts in the timeline.
2. Handle - A link to your bio
3. Action Verb - A verb that allows you to express a little more emotion (e.g. Changeforge “is”, “thinks”, “loves”).
4. Message - The message in 140 characters or less
5. Number of responses - indicates you have responses - or people replurking to your plurk.
6. Lastly, you get friendly reminders about updates and the ability to filter on all plurks or just responses, or just your plurks.

The Stats & Karma:

There are the normal stats like number of plurks, responses, and join date. However, the creators of Plurk are definitely geared towards spreading the word as indicated by some other stats like friends invited and profile views.

Also the makers of Plurk have added a fun game outside of the normal accumulation of friends, called Karma. Karma is achieved through various acts like number of referrals and overall activity. The exact calculation hasn’t been cracked just yet, which is probably best.

However, you can even subscribe to a robot that tracks your Karma and ranks you against other Plurkers. Beware, you can actually loose Karma as well, adding an element of slight risk to the mix.

Is Plurk a Twitter knock-off?

Well, let’s see, there is the fact that you can’t type in more than 140 characters, and an input screen that is very similar in nature. You have friends that you follow and that can follow you.

You will have to be the judge. Many Twitter fans accuse Plurk of being a knock-off of Twitter geared towards 14-year old Neopets. This might very well be true. Some feel the interface is great, and some feel it gets in the way.

Integration:

Plurker currently offers IM integration with a few clients like Yahoo! and Google Talk, and has a mobile version that seems to be a bit spotty at times. However, the real power for Plurker will come in its integrations. If it cannot cross the chasm to offer users more ways to interact with the community and find information in the fashion they choose, it will quickly loose steam and/or never reach the critical mass that now seems to plague Twitter.

Summary:

What I can say is there is a great amount of potential. With the influx of traffic, the Plurker team had a tough time with scaling, but made some quick adjustments and seemed to get back on track.

But what I think I like most about Plurker so far is the simple and raw fact that the community is so much nicer. Twitter seems to be plagued with A-listing egos and has meandered into a bloggers billboard for their latest blog. I use it for that too, don’t get me wrong, but there doesn’t seem to be the inquisitive substance I had hoped for many months ago when I started.

With Plurker, people seem to be genuinely interested in discovering each other and about each other some some degree. It has not become the stomping ground for the “ego’s” afoot to discuss why they like FriendFeed or Twitter - ad nauseum. It is a place to ask simple questions and get fun answers.

Plainly put - Plurk is not Twitter. Plurk is not revolutionary. Plurk is fun.

Where does this road lead?

If you liked this post, you might also want to read how my adventure in Plurk turned out.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

Zanshin is a Japanese term referring to a state of relaxed alertness and awareness. In Aikido, we practice this constantly - how to clear your mind, not to anticipate, react to the action at hand - no more and no less.

David Allen has this to say in his book Getting Things Done (link in the sidebar):

Imagine throwing a pebble into a still pond. How does the water respond? The answer is, totally appropriately to the force and mass of the input; then it returns to calm. It doesn’t overreact or underreact.

… The power in a … punch comes from speed, not muscle; it comes from a focused “pop” at the end of the whip… a tense muscle is a slow one. So the high levels of training in the martial arts teach and demand balance and relaxation as much as anything else. Clearing the mind and being flexible are the key.

Anything that causes you to overreact or underreact can control you, and often does.

Imagine finding a constant state of Zanshin. Is that even possible?

I for one don’t know yet if that is possible. However, I must remember it is a path to be walked not a destination in which we arrive.

What would be the goal of this you say?

Well, imagine if you will being able to slip into a highly productive state at will. For those that care about being productive, this would be a definite must have, right?

The danger I would surmise most of us “Type-A’s” have would be in the simple fact that we allow our life to become unbalanced. I allow work to flood into my life because I work in a profession, job, company, and role I truly love. However, by letting it become all-consuming, I risk polluting my “mind of water” and I can actually feel the physical and mental drain this begins to cause; I can feel the creep towards burn-out.

The other thing I have begun to realize is that I have allowed my physical well-being to slip. I eat what I want, not what I should; I do not exercice on a regular schedule outside of Aikido, lowering my endurance - both mentally and physically. I do not take enough time for spiritual enrichment. I do not take enough time for family and friends.

The sad thing is that I can rationalize just about any of this: Oh, there’s too much work to do to allow for the other things, just this one project needs to be done, If I only had 1 more hour in the day. But the truth is, as you all know, there is always something waiting around the corner for us productive people and there is never enough time in the day.

And as I step back and re-evaluate my tactical objectives in relation to my life goals, I realize I have taken a detour once again.

So remember: relax but do not become complacement, seek to clear your mind of clutter, and maintain balance in mind, body, and spirit.

Another great link is over at Zen Habits.