10 Takeaways from the 2009 MPS Conference

I have just finished with the two-day, first annual MPS Conference, organized by The Photizo Group. This conference focused on creating a platform for customers, dealers, manufacturers, and infrastructure providers to share thoughts, compare notes, and discover new ideas relating to the developing trends in managed services and document output management as a strategy to organizational cost reduction.

I thought I would share my takeaways from the conference:

1. Confirmation not epiphany: Many of those I spoke with at the conference felt there were “nuggets of wisdom” scattered throughout the conference, but in general everyone was more or less confirming the developing trends in the space.
2. Customers bring a candid perspectives: Throughout the presentations, I felt the customer presentations were of most value. They were both informative and candid. It was rather interesting to note that all customers shared common characteristics in their successes such as: project management methodologies, an over-arching governance program, strategic vision, championship/sponsorship, communications strategies, and expectations of service level agreements just like a managed services provider such as EDS might provide.
3. Partnership = Success: In every case study, success could be tied directly to the ownership and responsibility both the client and vendor took in the engagement. In other words, vendor driven relationships were a failure. Only when true partnerships were cast could long-lasting success be achieved.
4. MSP not MPS: A very candid presentation given by Lawton Smith of directpointe offered very compelling evidence of a trend that MPS will simply be a component of managed service. In other words, managed print services (MPS) providers are only fighting the inevitability they will be forced to compete with or become a managed services provider (MSP), as I had suspected in my article discussing Dell’s newly launched ProManage services.
5. Suspect adoption curve: Ed Crowley (Photizo Group) and Steve Reynolds (Lyra) offered dissenting opinions as to whether MPS was in the early majority phase or late majority phase, referencing Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.
6. Green is Gold: I attended a session presented by Laura Kittner of PrintFleet which termed “green as the new black.” In other words, environmental initiatives and related strategies have become an industry unto themselves. Not to disappoint, many marketers have seized the opportunity to turn “green into gold”, or monetize the opportunity to present environmentally aware messages. However, Laura really did hit on something that wasn’t simple stewardship; she focused on the ability to gather cross-platform data points and provide a real, bottom-line dollar value as to which output devices consistently waste power. I think the best characterization was when an audience member stated he felt like technology was now available to change the fluffy, soft-dollar suspicions about being environmentally friendly into quantitative, hard-dollar action items a corporation could finally bite into.
7. Education is the key – still: There was a resounding voice that education was still the key to success. Raising awareness can help the customer in every sense, and will most certainly help them avoid instances of malpractice.
8. A lot of moving parts – still: Although the technology to manage and operationalize managed programs has advanced dramatically, there is no franchise on how to implement a managed print strategy.
9. Standardization is a problem – still: Lack of standards is an apparent thorn in just about everyone’s side. Manufacturers are still holding a hard line on public versus private MIB information in the network interfaces, and the various independent monitoring providers indicated this trend will not only continue, but get worse; Evidently a developing trend to regress the amount of publicly available information is growing. This can only have dire consequences and is exactly opposite of what customers need.
10. Guarded sharing: It was an interesting observation that everyone at the conference was very open to discuss just about any topic. While this was refreshing at first blush, deeper conversations often revealed a very guarded approach to sharing information. I would observe this is a very humanistic response in any highly competitive market, which underscores the fundamental need for increased standards further promoting opportunity to build trust and should assist establishing etiquette.

Overall, I would count the conference as a success, and a great opportunity to spend some time gleaning information about where we have been and where many believe we are headed. For those that missed it, I highly recommend you come next year.

Image courtesy of: InCase Designs

Ken Stewart’s website, ChangeForge, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology in an information-centric world. Ken is also the founder of Seeking the Son. He is always interested in connecting; To discover the many ways you may connect with him, visit him at DandyID.