The organic growth of your peripherals

Mon, 26/09/2011 - 19:34 - Permalink

when an organization grows, it adds items to her existence, as requirements change. After a while, this will become a thread to the organization. Organizations must find at that time the courage to liberate resources to identify and manage them correctly.

Printers

A first element that one will find to have grown since start-up is the amount of small printers. At first, it seems like the right choice, these small ink-jet printers. And then one more, and then one that can scan, and another one that can print both sides of the paper, and than another one that can print on larger sizes,... And so now you have a couple of them, using different brands of cartridges (but all as expensive) and for none of them you have a maintenance contract. So when they stop working, you only can buy another one. Here are a couple of questions that will help you in weeding out printers:

  • How many pages are printed per month or per year? Look at tools like Fineprint, as they can reduce the amount of pages you actually print on your site;
  • What is the cost of all the current printers you have: device, paper, toners, interventions and installations?
  • When you are printing documents that will be snail mailed later, you can have a look at solutions such as
    • blue mail central, where you print documents to a cloudprovider who will print, put in an enveloppe and mail your document for one small prize.
    • our print-to-faxsolution: you print a document on your computer, give the faxnumber and the cloudservice behind will do the rest. When using fax-to-mail as well, your incoming faxes are no longer printed, but arrive as attachment in a mail in your mailbox
  • Who of your team needs printing in color, who needs larger size prints. If these are low numbers, talk to the local printshop and see if working with them is not a better solution?
  • When looking at the needs for input and output, would a multi-function device not be a better choice for the whole office. If you look at the total cost, we see that most organizations having ten or more people in one location will have benefit of changing all printers by one multi-function? You might know other small businesses and startups that are willing to share the use (and costs) of your larger printer.

Computers, servers, nas-storage, das-storage, software-media…

Look around in your office and have a look at all these peripheral devices that are attached to your wonderful computers. And then, after going trough them, have a look at what they hold and what is their purpose for your business. You will find that data in your company exists replicated on several devices and systems, but that no-one can tell you realy where the latest or most relevant version of a certain file can be found.

So when you evaluate the business process and business model to create at least some procedures, you will have to define where the data is stored, what applications are used to handle the data. By doing so, you will have done a great deal of work in making your disaster recovery plan as well (see my blog at ict4me of August 28). Some things you can do right now:

  • stop accepting that more usb-disks are added to your network, and look for a service-based storage that can be used by you and your team.
  • Define where what type of data should be saved (naming conventions are a great help, as are tags, and metainformation)
  • Make sure that the data is in a location that guarantees you to be there tomorrow (USB disks fail this simple test :-))
  • List where the media for your software is located (online or somewhere in a cupboard)

At ict4me, when we take over an ict-environment, we will work with you to define the best peripherals, the costs involved, the viability of the technology, etc... We will ook with you to seek the model that (in short and long term) involve the least possible cost and give you the reliability your organization requires. By you taking this mindset, and us taking the responsibility, you can again focus on the business and the business process – let us take care of your ict. How can we do this for you?

Koen