The Road to ‘Wise Print' – Part 2

The least expensive and most environmentally friendly page is the one that never gets printed at all

In my last post, I mentioned the book I am writing–"EcoWise Printing™: Gaining the Full Value of Printing in a Responsible Manner"–to create awareness about the financial and environmental costs of printing, and offered some reasons why I think most organizations are still struggling to understand how much they actually print and how much it's costing them.

One reason for this that I didn't cover is that print always seems to be only on the periphery of IT's radar. It represents only 15% of IT's budget and 15% of help desk calls, so it often gets stuck at priority number four or five and never really gets addressed. But nowadays, throwing in the environmental card may be just enough to take print management mainstream for many organizations. In short, print represents a perfect overlap of business requirements and environmental requirements–by better managing your print environment, you can pay less for print, while having a dramatic environmental impact.

One print-management credo that Compugen appears to be the only firm espousing is "print less".

Put simply, we believe that the least expensive and most environmentally friendly page is the one that never gets printed at all! To this end, a key goal of our Enterprise Imaging group is to help customers print less. With today's high levels of computerization, however, why aren't print volumes already going down? Let me share what I call my "itty bitty rules for why people print":

1. Legality—businesses still generally require signed paper contracts–it will take more time before the courts are no longer loath to accept electronic signatures on documents. As a result, law offices, for example, are big printers;

2. Reality—it is a well-known human condition that people need to be able to see and touch something before they fully accept that it is real and safe–"this is really important, so I'd better print it and keep a copy". It's referred to as the Haptic Response;

3. Practicality—when it comes to versatility, you simply can't beat a piece of paper–you can fold it, you can stuff it into your pocket, you can read it anywhere, it takes no time to boot up, you can drop it without it breaking and the batteries never run low!

While these rules may not be causing print volumes to go up, they are certainly helping to keep them at their status quo. My next post will offer thoughts on why print volumes are actually going up and explore alternatives that reduce or avoid the need for hardcopy printing altogether.