Roundtable

Green concerns dominate roundtable on printing solutions

Manoj Chandiramani (left), Senior Vice President - APAC Head IT, OP's, MF Global, chatting with Alok Bharadwaj (right), Senior Vice President, Canon India and Puneet Datta (center), Senior Manager - Marketing, Business Imaging Solutions Division, Canon India

“Think twice before you print this paper”—a message like that appended at the end of an e-mail might prompt an end user to refrain from printing the page. However, that’s a much simpler decision to take than those that bedevil technology decision makers who have to juggle employee demands and organizational goals to arrive at an optimum printing and documentation solution. A round table on CIO concerns on the topic of printing and documentation brought these challenges to the fore.

The roundtable was hosted by the Business Publications Division of Indian Express at the media house’s premises in South Mumbai and sponsored by Canon. It had participation from select CIOs across business verticals. Kailash Shirodkar, Chief Manager & Head IT Media Vertical, Business Publications Division, Indian Express moderated the discussion.

Alok Bharadwaj, Senior Vice-president, Canon India, said organizations hope to bring in efficiency in their operations only if printing solutions provided good control on, visibility into and monitoring over the printing process.

Coming from varied verticals, participating CIOs had different operational models in their organizations. It followed that their printing-related issues were also at variance. Sebastian Joseph, Executive Vice President & Head Technology, Mudra Communications, said that his company subscribed to an OPEX framework. “We base our calculations on per-page costs,” he said. “If somebody is offering me a lower charge, then I am ready to consider that.”

Not all developments in printing solutions were proving to be useful, Joseph pointed out.

A case in point is the network printer: although a single printer is capable of processing the requirements of a large part of the organization, that arrangement wouldn’t work at his organization as individual departments insisted on having their own printers.

The printed page posed other challenges. Even if the organization installed controls to check data leakage via electronic media (pen drives, e-mails, etc), employees were still able to take a printout of a confidential report and leave the organizational premises with it. “If an employee who is on his way out of the organization takes a business plan with him, it’s difficult to stop him,” Joseph said. An affordable solution to this problem still evaded CIOs, he added.

Melwyn Menezes, AVP – IT, ICICI Prudential, said that printing at his company was outsourced and that bringing down the cost per page was his primary challenge.

For Dilip Sharma, Head IT Applications & New Initiatives, Birla Sun Life Asset Management, managing costs was critical. At the same time, meeting the genuine needs of users was important.

An employee forgetting confidential documents at the printer has been the stuff of many a movie plot, but that’s the reality and causes a nightmare for IT security teams, according to V Subramanian, DGM and CISO, IDBI Bank. He said that as the bulk of his bank’s printing requirements were outsourced, the organization exercised great caution to ensure that confidential data was well protected and that everyone adheres to privacy guidelines.

Some CIOs said that they were still grappling with the problem of ensuring that printers in the organization were used only for official work. Reducing print wastage was another issue. With companies keen to project a green image, CIOs were given the mandate to reduce waste wherever possible. Given this situation, the moderator asked whether CIOs found it worth their while to look into these matters.

In response to this question, Manoj Chandiramani, Senior Vice President - APAC Head IT, OP's, MF Global, said that it was unrealistic to expect CIOs to be giving their time to monitoring the usage of printers on a daily basis. Often the administration team comes up with interesting suggestions, Chandiramani noted. To tap into ideas from employees, MF Global has started a practice whereby every month one department is expected to come up with cost-saving and efficiency-boosting ideas. Ideas for optimal use of stationery, including printing papers, often came from this forum, Chandiramani said.

Menezes said that dissimilar printers in different departments made it difficult to calculate the best way to reduce printing costs.

Bharadwaj provided insights into new developments in printing and documentation solutions. For instance, one of the solutions enabled a user to make sure that a printed copy did not fall in the wrong hands: “You can give a print command from your system, but the printer only prints a copy after the user swipes an identity card at the printer. Networked printers make it possible for a user to collect a printout at any networked printer installed in the organization,” he said.

Bharadwaj, however, conceded that the industry did not have solutions for all of the problems that enterprises faced, and so forums like these would help Canon innovate on its product line to address this fact.

—Aditya Kelekar