Morris Wallack Director, Presales support; HP Imaging and Printing Americas

I’ve been working at HP for over 25 years and over the last 10 years within HP’s Imaging and Printing Group. Over those 10 years I’ve focused heavily on printing services and helping customers make the most of their HP (and non-HP) investments in print infrastructure. In this first of a series of posts, I’m going to define Managed Print Services (MPS)  from an experiential perspective, discuss what it is and isn’t, and what it might and might not be.  In future posts, I plan to write about what large enterprise organizations are doing to build effective print strategies and plans, enabling processes and assessments and effective policy, governance and change management in MPS deployments.

So what’s the big deal? How hard can it be to define managed print services? Well, what’s interesting is that the term has evolved over the years in our industry to mean a variety of things to different people, in part because the industry continues to experience convergence. Digital and analog technologies have converged, most notably printers and multi-function digital devices (MFPs like HP’s M4345 ) converging with analog copiers and moving to digital.  The copier industry model was a labor-based support model combined with walk-up copiers (not on the network) and financially “managed” on a cost-per-page or “click”. In those days, copier services were commonly managed by facilities departments of large organizations, and management consisted mostly of overseeing a contract to cover those services.

Over time, and in parallel, digital printers were connected to networks and IT departments in large organizations started to use remote management tools (like HP’s original Jetadmin and now WebJetadmin) to manage their extensive and far-flung printer fleets.   So from an IT perspective, managing meant “managing the fleet with tools to manage drivers, configurations, IP addresses and the like”.

So, here we are in 2008 and people wonder what is meant when someone says MPS.  I think it can be expansive or narrow, depending on your point of view.  An expansive viewpoint would include the management of devices, processes, people and technology to deliver a set of defined user experiences related to print/copy/fax/scan within an enterprise. A narrower viewpoint might refer to those who consider managed print services to be just a contract including devices, supplies/consumables, repair service and support and a modicum of technology or processes to pull it all together.  From an internal service provider view (a la an IT department), it might mean “do it yourself” in providing the “defined set of user experiences related to print/copy/fax/scan” while only contracting to buy or purchase devices and supplies from vendors like HP. But what’s got to be common for managed print services to be viable (and I’ll discuss this in a later post) is the disciplined approach to manage the print/copy/fax/scan environment. That’s the first and most distinguishing characteristic I see in all the companies I work with – the big divide between those who are approaching print/copy/fax/scanning with a disciplined plan, and those who are not. Independent of being expansive or narrow, they’ve consciously decided to manage it.

In my next post, I’ll discuss what it takes to get started, what people are doing to build strategic plans to tackle moving to a managed environment, and my perspectives on what separates the winners from the losers.

I invite you to use the comment link below to let me know what MPS means to you.

Technorati tags: enterprise printing, hp, Hewlett Packard, multi-function printer, MFP, Managed print services