Network and Communication

Printers are all too often overlooked in an IT purchasing strategy - and this is a great shame. Your printers directly produce the material customers and business partners see, and they also represent a large and mostly unmanaged cost to your business. Recent research found that most organisations are blissfully unaware of the financial costs their printers are racking up, and the environmental cost they are adding to the company's footprint. This is a shame because printers are easily managed and the decision criteria can be easily understood. Printer choices are being driven by the recession and a new environmental awareness - backed up increasingly by regulations. Printer makers are responding to these demands, and the market is moving into a new phase. Users will be choosing to have fewer printers, but larger, more efficient and smarter printers. They may increasingly also choose to buy a print service instead of running and managing all. If you understand the direction of the market, and the specifications of existing printers, and if you can calculate the output you require, you can compare the likely total cost of ownership for a range of models, and find the one that suits your needs best. We hope this guide will help you do that for your company.

For several years running, improving Business Process Management (BPM) has become a top priority for companies. CIOs and IT executives continue to place business process improvement as the top business priority for their IT organizations1,2,3. Of course, there are many options for improving business processes – ranging from complete process re-engineering to adopting new process management methodologies, like Lean Six Sigma, or adding new capabilities to existing systems. At Lombardi, we believe that an investment in BPM software, coupled with new approaches to project implementation, is the best investment companies can make in delivering sustainable business process improvement. This paper is intended for groups who want to make the business case for investing in BPM to drive process improvement. It provides an overview of the areas of benefit that companies can expect from BPM as well as concrete examples of value. It also compares the use of BPM to alternative approaches for driving process improvement. Finally, this paper provides a basic introduction to the costs associated with a BPM initiative.

In the 1990's, workflow vendors created quite a bit of confusion in the market when trying to define workflow and how it could best be utilized. Today, that situation is being replicated in the BPM industry. Ask 10 different vendors to define BPM or BPM suites, and you will likely get 10 variations of the definition, even though all vendors use the same basic terminology to explain it. Organizations need help sorting through this confusion in order to discover why a BPM suite is a different, and more important, application for process improvement.

These insights on Business Process Management (BPM) come from Toby Redshaw, the Group CIO that is leading a successful BPM program at Aviva plc, the world's fifth-largest insurance group. These remarks were made during Toby's keynote presentation at the Lombardi Driven 2009 User Conference.

To ensure non-stop delivery of essential business services to users across and beyond the enterprise, IT data centers require constant, diligent management. There are two reasons, however, why it is not wise to have technicians constantly going in and out of the data center to perform these daily management tasks. First, over-reliance on the physical presence of technicians in the data center is slow and ineffi cient. Every time someone gets up from his or her desk to install a patch or run some diagnostics, valuable time is lost - time that could be spent taking care of other important tasks. Second, foot traffic through the data center is never a good thing. When too many people spend too much time around critical systems, it greatly increases exposure to both malicious and inadvertent security risks.