Taking your Business Digital

The Journey from Managed Print Services to Managed Content Services

By Ken Van Aelst

Many companies today know about Managed Print Services (MPS). They’ve sat through meetings with consultants and heard about the business benefits. They’ve sent out the RFPs, studied the proposals and signed the contracts. But are they ready yet for Managed Content Services or MCS?

According to Gartner, “MCS is a comprehensive package that rationalizes, streamlines and optimizes business communications by providing customers with consultative help, software and implementation … In the early stages of maturation, it is tightly coupled with MPS and focuses on communications inside of the organization.”

Want to get your MCS strategy off the ground? Leverage your MPS foundation and your MPS provider’s experience, assuming they have the ability to take you to the next level. Not all do. Pay attention to a provider’s experience in smartly bundling devices, software, services and support to lay the groundwork for MCS. A Next Generation MPS provider already thinks that way. The respected three-stage Next Generation MPS approach of access and optimize, secure and integrate, automate and simplify is designed to pave the way to MCS.

Make MPS Your Bridge from Print to Content
The bridge between MPS and MCS becomes clearer when you consider MCS as an evolution of MPS. MCS shifts the focus from devices and printing to capture and content. MCS is about the birth, use, transformation and death of content, both printed and electronic. In other words — the content life cycle. It’s hard to separate MPS from that view, since MPS operates at critical junctures of many document processes.

MCS requires strategies for security, sharing and accessing documents inside and outside the enterprise, requirements that are already part of the MPS value prop. However, even paper-optimized operations must still deal with printed documents from outsiders like customers and suppliers. MCS involves scanning these documents to compress the content life cycle, launch a process and make the information move faster. Good security practice requires that users be authenticated as they scan information at the device, and MPS provides that bridge between device-level security and the beginning of MCS workflow.

Easing into Business Transformation
MCS is part of the ongoing evolution of the enterprise document environment, fighting for IT attention along with other factors like mobility and cloud. The role of Next Gen MPS is to enable the transition from helping enterprises optimize printers and MFPs, to handling their documents more efficiently and eliminating printing where practical.

This isn’t an overnight transformation of your current state. A three-stage MPS approach solves problems gradually in prescribed steps, and this approach leads neatly into MCS. You don’t have to overhaul big chunks of infrastructure and deal with the disruption that goes along with it. The MPS-to-MCS path gives you breathing room as you undergo transition, with your MPS provider guiding your strategy and doing the work to implement it.

MPS Fleet Optimization Prepares You for MCS
MPS and MCS both embrace the premise that enterprises have an abundance of paper that must be brought under control. As enterprises wean off paper, or more likely, come to terms with hybrid paper and digital document environments, a forward-looking MPS strategy leverages the environment you have to get to the digital workplace you want. MPS slims down your fleet to prepare you for the next generation of document needs. Your MPS provider should be able to help you make that journey.

It’s not just about putting document security safeguards in place. When moving to an MCS environment makes sense for your enterprise, you’ll need an MPS vendor to continuously optimize your fleet size down, so you’re not stuck with several years of leases just as you’re ready to start digitizing content. Your MPS provider should be very strategic about what equipment to keep in place and ensuring flexibility in your contract. Sit down soon with your MPS provider and find out how they prepared they are to get you ready for MCS.

Ken Van Aelst is the Vice President of Eastern Operations for Xerox Canada, experts in engineering the flow of work to help clients achieve greater efficiency and productivity and realize better business results. He is based in Montreal.



Erika Navarro
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