Printer company prepares for paperless office

AS A printer manufacturer preparing for the advent of the paperless office, Japanese-headquartered multinational Ricoh is seeking to lessen its reliance on hardware. Almost 15 per cent of its €16.4 billion in global revenues relates to services, a percentage it is seeking to grow.

“It has to become the predominant part of our business, because otherwise we’ll become like the music industry,” said David Mills, executive vice-president of operations, Ricoh Europe.

The company is not alone in its awareness of the need to evolve – according to a survey of 567 senior executives conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Ricoh, six in 10 respondents believe the vertical market in which their organisations operate will bear little resemblance in 2020 to how it looks today.

The “wrenching change” forecasted is expected to include a decisive shift in power to customers, the decentralisation of management and a much more virtual working environment. It could also mean death to the middle manager and the long-awaited birth of not just a paperless office, but one where computer hardware operating off a common server becomes a thing of the past.

“We see the changes happening very quickly now. The speed of change is getting quicker and quicker,” said Mr Mills.

Organisations that can’t keep pace with a relentless, technology-driven improvement in cost-efficiency will, by definition, disappear, observed the senior executives surveyed for the study, entitled Frontiers of Disruption.

The full results will be published next year, but a taster summary contains some interesting predictions. Some 62 per cent of the sample believe that in 2020, responsibility for the delivery of most IT services will reside within individual business units rather than a central IT function. More than three-quarters predict IT services will be delivered via external parties – cloud computing providers, in other words. And most employees will conduct all communications and electronic work using just one device. “The lobby here is for staff to bring in their own equipment,” said Mr Mills. “We say no, but I think you can only say no for so long.”

Nevertheless, Ricoh’s client base of its Fortune 500 peers are “still going to need hardware”, and Ricoh’s new generation of products includes short-throw projectors that hook onto skirting boards, hotspot printers to which any email account can connect and portable teleconferencing units that allow up to 32 people to hold a meeting.

Document security is “probably the biggest thing” companies want to do, but they’re also “desperate to save costs” – as are public bodies, said Alan Mason, managing director of Ricoh Ireland, which has an office, newly cleared of filing cabinets, in Glasnevin, Dublin.

Government departments’ drive to slash costs often translates into a crude fixed percentage coming off all expenditure, Mason noted, rather than making a switch to more efficient processes. “There are fortunes to be saved. But people are so frantically busy with managing their departments, they haven’t engaged properly.”