How Modernizing Print Infrastructure Advances Digital Workplace Maturity

Learn how printing fits into Digital Workplace Maturity and how PrintOps is charting a new path for leading enterprises.

As investment in digital transformation continues to grow, digital workplace maturity has emerged as an important bellwether and ladder defining the effectiveness of an organization’s use of digital technologies to achieve its goals.

Among the various digital workplace maturity models developed by analyst firms, Gartner®’s model provides a helpful starting point for companies to assess their maturity level and make strategic choices about where to prioritize their next steps.

As it stands today, 85% of companies sit at Level 1 or Level 2 of Gartner®’s model, indicating overall low maturity and a need for foundational elements of modernization.

Print, in particular, tends to lag behind other workplace technology improvements, representing a key opportunity for improving efficiency and advancing digital workplace maturity.

Companies looking to incorporate print into their digital strategy should focus on the emerging category of PrintOps–the modern, cloud-native, user-centric approach to printing and the infrastructure and operations that support it.

1. First Steps: Level 1 to Level 2

While 56% of organizations surveyed by Gartner® currently sit at a Level 2 in their maturity model, the reality is that most organizations are still at Level 1 when it comes to printing. At this level, which Gartner® labels as the “Reacting” level, companies are mainly focused on managing devices and the IT backlog, as well as providing reactive IT support.

Gartner® points out that moving from Level 1 to Level 2 requires that business modernize their tools and technology, pointing specifically to cloud-first tooling as a tech enabler. By moving print infrastructure to the cloud with a PrintOps platform, organizations can establish a strong foundation for advancing to Level 2, the ‘Supporting’ level, unlocking the potential to:

• Monitor technology performance and availability
• Better manage connections to endpoint devices
• Support printing within the context of hybrid work and BYOD policies

Another important requirement for advancing to Level 2 is using tools with integrated measures and analytics to move from a reactive to a proactive state. A PrintOps platform facilitates a proactive, data-driven approach via centralized print analytics that helps companies:

• Gain centralized visibility into the entire print environment
• Track prints, printer status, user trends and printer utilization metrics
• Manage print costs intelligently and reduce wasteful printing habits
• Understand the sustainability impact of print in the organization

Note that print analytics on their own aren’t enough to move an organization up the maturity scale. Rather, modernizing print infrastructure by moving it to the cloud is the critical first step that sets the stage for future maturity growth.

2. Making the Leap: Level 2 to Level 3

Moving from Level 2 “Supporting” to Level 3 “Enabling” is a bigger jump and involves shifting the types of services you provide to employees. In the future, robust PrintOps platforms will likely build on Level 2 by layering in capabilities aligned with the Gartner® model, including:

• Self-service IT support to improve IT efficiency and user experience
• The ability to easily print from where users work—a top concern for hybrid and mobile employees
• Automated incident detection to proactively manage problems

Consider, for example, how most IT departments today don’t know a printer is down until a user calls the help desk. At this point, the user has typically exhausted all other troubleshooting options and workarounds, only reaching out to IT once frustration is high.

With a modern PrintOps platform, companies can monitor printer status to identify and resolve issues proactively. In the near future, companies will be able to integrate PrintOps with IT mega platforms like ServiceNow to automatically generate an incident ticket so it can be tracked and addressed efficiently.

Meanwhile, generative AI will be able to help employees troubleshoot problems such as password issues and connecting to printers. Not only will this minimize frustration and help keep workers productive, but it will also reduce help desk tickets overall.

3. Solving Print to Facilitate Maturity Growth

Many organizations today are moving towards zero-trust security models, closing data centers, and modernizing IT infrastructure to reduce costs and support the hybrid workforce.

Those that don’t incorporate print into their digital strategy will inevitably run into problems around security, infrastructure and support, as well as increased costs. This inefficiency ultimately stands in the way of digital workplace maturity, forcing organizations into a reactive rather than proactive stance when it comes to print.

The good news is that modernizing the print infrastructure is a relatively low lift compared with deploying other enterprise applications. Just as important, you can do it in a way that is invisible to end users, who won’t have to struggle with learning a new tool.

In other words, solving the issue of print is low-hanging fruit that can reduce costs, improve the user experience and enable IT to be more proactive about print issues.

Step one is modernizing print infrastructure by moving to a PrintOps cloud platform. Until you get there, you can’t begin to build any of the higher-level capabilities discussed here.

Source: Gartner Research – Enhance Maturity and Improve Investment Prioritization Using Gartner’s Digital Workplace Maturity Model