Heric says IT delivers productivity gains and efficiency at an amazingly small price
From my visits to print-service facilities it is clear that an Information Technology infrastructure is more crucial to success than it has ever been before. While many large facilities have been building professional IT implementations, in our industry building an IT infrastructure is almost an afterthought, reactive to the needs rather than being pre-emptive to the problems and opportunities. But it is imperative to assess, and plan for growth and future needs, rather than to react to space on the server problems. A well-planned IT infrastructure will negate many potential problem areas, and present a wealth of opportunity beyond traditional backup and retrieval.Time to look at things…
It can be a difficult to breach a network/server/workstation audit to any stalwart IT worker, and to analyse the results with a mindset of finding bottlenecks or improvements. Knowing what one has in the facility, how it is [or is not] being used, and where problems or weaknesses typically occur, can go a very long way to planning or fixing those issues long-term.
This does not mean that one needs to hire an advanced computer science degree specialist or consultant at first, as many sound practices in IT have been made to be simple and attainable by the in-house staff of most printers. Every printer has someone on staff that does level-one support and planning for the IT infrastructure, and they are the ideal people to get involved at the audit stage. An IT audit is a positive move, if nothing else, to share with the rest of the facility what is often only in the mind of the one designated Mac guy with the rest of the work-group, and to give them a chance to share what their biggest issues are. They know what they need, and what works and does not.
Plan for the basics:
Disaster Recovery – Beyond mere backup and retrieval, this basic IT principal is meant to minimise any downtime or lost information or jobs. Planning for how much information needs to be actively accessible and mission-critically stored, can mean easy, sleep-filled nights for the in-house IT staffer. Modern high-speed internet connections also allow for off-site backup solutions that are simple, fault-tolerant backup solutions that further simplify the once-complex task of backup. With the advent of large, fault-tolerant disk-arrays, and internet backup, the need to maintain large libraries of expensive, proprietary data tapes, DVD’s/CD’s, and the devices to read and write them become less essential or desirable. Divide your data into ‘What must be kept online at all times’, ‘What would be nice to have on the server’, and ‘What can be killed off after the job is done.’ Storing the appropriate data in the appropriate manner, is an easy first-step at planning for that insurance that you will have that data when and if you need it.
User/Worker experiences – Listen to your users and workers. If there is something simple that can be changed on the server, and make everyone’s life more simple, it definitely makes sense to implement it. ‘It is so slow to open up a large scan from the server’ is something that the IT guy may not know, but the users curse 37 times a day.
Bandwidth/Capacity – As I have been saying for more than 25 years, you can never have enough storage. Storage and server capacity is truly becoming a non-issue, and if you are running up against limitations in this it has never been a better time to upgrade it. (You can purchase 1 terabyte hard-drives for under US$100 today) Rubik’s Workflow – Often, large-gains in IT productivity can be had by simple modifications to the way a document is worked on or sent through the network/servers. A fast network (for example) can open large Photoshop documents easily over the network, but many people use procedures involving copying those images to the desktop for edit, and back. A simple change in procedure, once server and network capacity are addressed, can make far-ranging benefits in productivity. Analysis of workflow and user-experiences will make these issues apparent. More high-end workflow technologies like JDF will be much more far-ranging, but for the beginner, a simple workflow assessment can transform productivity, and further highlight bottlenecks that have silently just become that way because, ‘That’s just the way we always do that…’
So, with the outlay of a few hours or days of productivity, a modern print facility can pinpoint what issues need to be addressed, and prepare cost analysis of upgrading or replacing the resultant issues. These can be almost embarrassingly affordable. A modern server can be had for a few thousand dollars, complete with several terabytes of raid storage. In addition, modern server software like MacOS X Server can serve Unix, Mac, and Windows environments all extremely quickly, and easily administrable with internal employees. (With the additional benefit of easy to add/configure/administer FTP, WWW and e-mail services to the facility.) Servers are no longer solely the realm of those with an IT masters degree, today they have software user-interfaces that simplify these roles. Sometimes just changing the way in which information is stored, moved, or accessed can mean large gains in productivity. Other times, simple and affordable upgrades can solve problems that cause many man-hours to circumvent on older obsolete (albeit paid for) technology. There is a lesson to be learned in not being penny-wise and pound-foolish with IT spending. Rarely in business does one get the returns capable with a responsible IT audit and implementation.
