Real Business at Xerox

By Bob Wagner, Corporate Public Relations, Xerox

I frequently look to our industry’s leaders for knowledge and inspiration—and that includes peering right into my own backyard.  This was the case recently when I sat in on a presentation titled, “Mastering the Game of Change,” by Kevin Warren, the president of Xerox’s $3 billion United States Client Operations, whose talk focused on business transformation.

While not everybody will admit to it, most of us fear change.  Hey, change isn’t easy—but most of us have learned it’s necessary for survival in today’s fast-paced world.

Consider that the average tenure of companies on the S&P 500 has dropped from 61 years in 1958, to 25 years in 1980, and just 18 years today.  The takeaway: change is happening at an ever-faster pace, and companies that don’t adapt and transform fade away.

That’s the message that Kevin delivered to 1,100 attendees of the CenterState CEO Annual Meeting in Syracuse.  He talked about the need to stay nimble to stay ahead of the change curve, the need to re-frame change to see it as an opportunity, and the need to think and do things differently in order to sustain positive change.

This made for an especially compelling message here in upstate New York, where cities like Syracuse and Rochester(where I live and work) fight to remain vibrant as their traditional manufacturing bases have decreased.  As Kevin pointed out, Xerox is a great example of one upstate-borne company that has undergone significant transformations to maintain industry leadership positions over the years.

Long known popularly as “the copier company,” we shifted our emphasis to digital printing in the 1990s, and added business process and I.T. outsourcing services in the most recent decade.  Last year, for the first time, our revenues from services were greater than those from our heritage printing business.  And today, as Kevin explained, Xerox can be found in lots of unexpected places—such as managing red-light cameras on traffic signals and the E-ZPass toll collection program used on many the nation’s thruways and turnpikes.

You can learn more about mastering the game of change by checking out Kevin’s presentation.  It might just change the way you think about change.

Bob is head of global communications for Xerox’s Technology business and, as a long-time New York Yankees fan, he’s become quite accustomed to change.

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By Kate Dobbertin Bernola, manager, Global Social Marketing, Xerox

May is here, which means for those of us in the Northern hemisphere, it’s time for spring cleaning!  Once you’re through with the mop and bucket, turn your attention to these other areas that may be in need of a little dusting.

1. Your social media sites:  Have you added your latest job role to LinkedIn?  Was your Facebook profile picture taken in the past two years?  Does your Twitter bio reflect your current interests?  Read through your basic info for your personal sites and also your company’s pages.  Chances are, you’ll have a “Wow, bubble tea used to be one of my top five favorite things?” moment.
2. Your webpage:  You may be surprised at how quickly your webpage has become outdated.  It’s a meticulous task, but a necessary one – have someone comb your site, page-by-page, to check for broken links and old references.
3. Your devices:  Delete old photos, contacts, files, and apps to free up space on your laptop, tablet, and smartphone.  (Here’s a quick how-to.)  While you’re at it, give the outside a good polish.
4. Your routine:  Could your workflow be more efficient?  Should you add a morning planning period or end a call that no longer adds value?  Take a moment to reevaluate your daily schedule at work and at home.  You’ll be surprised at what you can cut out – or what is missing.
5. Your budget:  What’s changed in the past few months?  Perhaps you didn’t realize quite how out-of-control that latte habit as become, or you’ve forgotten about those five online magazine subscriptions you never read.  On the other end of the scale, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones with excess cash chilling in a bank account that could be moved into a more lucrative investment.  A quick audit can help to determine where your hard-earned money is going and how you might be using it better.

These tasks won’t take very long to complete, but they will simplify your business and your life.  Like my mother always said after I cleaned my room, “Now, don’t you feel so much better?  Go outside and play!”  (Side note:  my mom is currently laughing at the notion that I ever cleaned my room as a child.)

This post was inspired by Managed Print Services and Spring Cleaning Advice for Governments.

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By Deborah Drago-Leaf, manager, Education Support, Xerox

Teaching grade school children today is just as much about reviewing a lesson as it is developing the skills students need in order to learn. To do this, we need to be masters at reaching kids individually and discovering misperceptions or missing skills that, when addressed, help deepen the student’s learning.  Think that’s easy? It’s not! We assign, we observe, we discuss, we question, we grade, we sort – this takes a ton of time!

As a teacher for six years, I know many of us often put in 12-hour days to “get it all done.”  A colleague recently told me she used to work Sunday nights to get plans and materials prepared for the upcoming week, but with this year’s adoption of Common Core State Standards, she now works all day on Sundays to complete that challenge.

Enter Ignite.

I’ve kept this friend in mind while working with scientists at Xerox Research Center Webster to develop the Xerox Ignite™ Educator Support System, a one-of-a-kind solution that makes it faster for teachers to evaluate how students are doing, even taking into account their handwritten work.

When I first introduce the capabilities of Ignite to teachers, their eyes grow wide because it seems too good to be true.  And it is.  Using the power of data analytics, Ignite simplifies the steps a teacher must take to assess how a child is learning, ultimately saving valuable time that can be put back into what is truly important – teaching our children. This video shows a bit more about how it all works:

Kids can be funny little enigmas. One minute they’re eager to offer up any number of truths; openly explaining how Dad mows the lawn in his underpants, for example. And then the next thing you know they turn into masterful secret keepers, insisting they “get it” when their teacher wants to know if they’ve understood the lesson.  As an educator, I think Ignite is our next secret weapon!

Deborah  Drago-Leaf  has been an elementary teacher for six years, and is currently a member of the Ignite research team.  Outside the lab, she teachers yoga and is a long-distance runner – all year round which is quite an accomplishment in Rochester, New York. Married to a fellow teacher, they are raising two teenagers  and a new puppy. 

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By John Lanphere, manager, Business Transformation, Xerox

John Lanphere is one of five Xerox employees granted a fully-paid leave of absence this year through the Xerox Social Service Leave program. He is currently in his fifth month of the program, working with Save The Children in Westport, CT, and will continue through December 2013.

Pi is famously calculated to trillions of digits—but how many of them do we really, really need? Apparently, just 39 will do.

I was watching a recent video which suggested that taking Pi to 39 digits allows you to measure the circumference of the observable universe to within the width of a single hydrogen atom. Sure, you could use more digits, but it’s not really worth the effort. And that means that on a day-to-day basis, you can ignore most of those pesky digits. 

And going one step further, using 3.1 digits gets you to a 95 percent confidence interval.

But what exactly does this have to do with my social service leave experience? Great question.

I was talking to a colleague at Xerox recently and sharing my reflection that even when we think we have a streamlined approach, it still needs to be trimmed way down when applied here at Save The Children. A smaller organization can’t tolerate waste when trying to remove waste. There’s no spare capacity. The phones still ring. Someone has to answer them. When coming to a (much) smaller organization, it is obvious there needs to be a lighter weight approach. I’ve learned that often 20 percent of the approach is capable of getting 80 percent of the results. More lean. Less precision. Same great taste. Less filling.

And once you realize that, the next obvious question is, “Why isn’t that approach good enough all of the time?” Well, sometimes ‘close’ is good enough. Sometimes, of course, it isn’t. The trick is to be aware of the opportunity to streamline and decide what you need.

I find myself wondering how often I’ve fallen into the trap of, “That’s just the way it’s done,” and not stopping to ask myself, “How much do I really need?” At least for now, I know I’ll be asking myself this question a lot more often.

Here at Save The Children I have the ability to take some of the things I’ve learned during my career at Xerox and really make a difference in the community. It’s an extremely rewarding experience and I look forward to seeing how else I can contribute.

Follow the rest of John’s Social Service Leave experience on his personal blog: http://steppingoutsocial.blogspot.com/

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By Conrad Mills, marketing manager, Xerox Europe

Think about the best customer service you’ve ever had. What made it stand out? Chances are one of the reasons was that when you called, the team at the other end knew exactly what to do.

That’s exactly how I felt when my network recently reached capacity. In fact, my service provider knew about the problem before I did, and contacted me to advise on the programmes that were hogging the most bandwidth, and easy ways for me to fix the problem.

This is a nice example of proactive customer service at its best. But what if your problem is global? What if you’re a CIO looking after an enterprise where technical issues arise at any time of day or night, across multiple offices? In this light, establishing global customer support looks a good deal more complex.

This was an issue Xerox looked at when we set up our managed print services (MPS) model over 10 years ago. The key aim for this approach was global consistency, something that can’t be achieved by setting up individual support offices here there and everywhere.

So we decided to set up the Xerox Global Delivery Centre, a network global delivery centres for all of our MPS customers and partners along with their service providers.

With Xerox software proactively monitoring an entire print fleet, including volumes, utilisation and associated costs, we are able to fix problems before the customer is even aware of them, and take a significant burden off the IT helpdesk.

This global delivery capability is part of our belief that customer service can be more than the traditional call centre, and become an active part of a business that contributes to the bottom line. It’s why we are listed as a leader for MPS in IDC’s EMEA Managed Print Services 2012 Hardcopy Vendor Analysis and are used by multi-national firms around the world.

How is customer service making a difference to your business? If you have any thoughts you’d like to share, please add them below.

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By John Lynn, founder, Healthcare Scene

One of the beauties of TEDMED is that they do a really professional job recording the event and sharing the recorded video with the world. For those who missed it or want to re-watch certain sessions, you can find the full TEDMED session recordings available online. Thanks to Xerox, I was able to cover the event in person. If you’re looking for a cliff notes version of TEDMED, check out my previous posts covering the event:

• The Big Takeaways from The Breakaway Group Healthcare Forum at TEDMED
• The TEDMED Experience
• Inspiring Multidisciplinary Collaboration to Achieve Innovation – TEDMED

As I think back on TEDMED, I’m stuck wondering about a major healthcare group I would have loved to see on the TEDMED stage: hospital and healthcare administrators. No doubt they’re doing some really innovative things in healthcare, but yet we didn’t see any of them on stage talking about how to innovate the nuts and bolts of healthcare.

It’s not that many of these hospital and healthcare administrators weren’t at TEDMED, because they were there in force. I met with many of them and saw many of them tweeting about TEDMED like this tweet from New York Presbyterian CIO, Aurelia Boyer:

Back at ranch #TEDMED may be having more effect on how I see things than I thought it would.

— Aurelia Boyer (@aboyernyp) April 23, 2013

I hope that many more hospital and healthcare administrators will “Step Out” and speak at TEDMED like Hospital CIO Bill Reiger did at The Breakaway Group’s Healthcare Forum at TEDMED. It’s great that hospital and healthcare administrators are listening and learning at TEDMED, but they also have a voice that needs to be heard.

Looking forward to the next year in healthcare let me suggest three topics I hope we’ll find at TEDMED 2014:

Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) - ACOs represent the core of a rapidly changing healthcare reimbursement environment. This change will fundamentally alter healthcare as we know it. ACOs are a hard topic to package into a slick presentation, but there are stories to be told about the impact for good and bad of ACOs. We often hear: “If you’ve seen one ACO, you’ve seen…one ACO.” How about we start with one ACO TEDMED talk and expand from there?

Interoperability - Almost nothing could provide more value to healthcare than true data interoperability. There are literally hundreds and possibly thousands of people affected every day by the lack of healthcare interoperability. The challenges to interoperability are real and powerful, but I see a shifting tide where organizations are finally looking to embrace interoperability and its inherent benefits. TEDMED would be the perfect place to highlight the interoperability success stories that will inspire others to follow.

Patient Engagement - A number of sessions at TEDMED 2013 began the discussion of the shifting role of patients in healthcare. I won’t be surprised if 2014 becomes the Year of the Patient. Like a slow moving ship that’s impossible to stop, the patient is finally becoming the center of healthcare. ZDoggMD’s comment at TEDMED highlights this shift from the physician perspective: “I went in to medicine to do things for patients, not to patients.” Patients at the center of healthcare is a message that needs to be shared.

In true TEDMED form, it only seems appropriate that I also suggest a collaborative musical act that could perform at a future TEDMED. If you’ve never heard of The Piano Guys, they’re great. Where else have you seen a piano and cello collaboration perform Coldplay, Usher, and Adele? Although, their real genius is when they take two songs and mix them into one beautiful piece like they did with Love Story Meets Viva La Vida. I can think of a few areas of healthcare that could benefit from some unexpected collaboration.

What did you take away from TEDMED 2013? Have you had a change in perspective personally or professionally? What topics should we see at future TEDMED events?

You can hear more reflections from TEDMED and predictions for the future of healthcare during the May 2 at 2 p.m. ET “Xerox ‘Ask the Experts’ Episode: Looking Ahead After TEDMED” Google+ Hangout that I’m hosting and participating in. Click here for more details and to watch.

John Lynn is the founder of the nationally renowned blog network Healthcare Scene, which consists of 15 blogs that have been viewed more than 10 million times.  John can be found on Twitter at @techguy and @ehrandhit.

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John Lynn filed this content as a paid contributor to Xerox. The content is the author’s opinion and does not necessarily reflect the views of Xerox.

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By Brian Lincoln, senior product line manager, DocuShare Business Unit, Xerox

It’s a necessary evil: business travelers have to carry their laptops with them so they have easy access to the documents they need in airports, in-flight and in remote locations.

Much to the mobile worker’s relief, sleek, light-weight devices like tablets and smartphones have lifted some of the weight of heavy laptops off our shoulders. These devices offer more mobility for employees on-the-go, and are helping solve issues for many business travelers. Mobile apps that connect to enterprise content management (ECM) systems provide secure, digital access to documents while in the air and on the ground, alleviating any frazzled feelings working globe trotters may experience.

The headaches for traveling executives don’t stop upon landing. I know one personal worry is the thought of printing something sensitive – like a customer contract or proprietary information – to a printer back at the office, but not being there to pick it up. With mobile print options available today, professionals in all different fields can ease that tension by securely printing to a convenient location from a mobile print-enabled device. What’s more, meeting attendees in remote locations can be on the same page by obtaining a copy through cloud print. Having access to a document management system provides a convenient library to print from.

The globe trotter has had a successful meeting, but the document journey isn’t over just yet. The third leg of this venture is about to begin. Following the meeting, business travelers need to capture the materials shared during the session so that coworkers back home can access them. Many ECM systems, including DocuShare, offer a range of scanning and capture solutions to connect travelers and colleagues with a single step.

After a long day of document management, it’s now time to head back home. Instead of working – or worrying – the traveler can put the seat back, headphones on and watch the in-seat entertainment because any needs for mobile access, printing and capture were all taken care of by Xerox’s Mobile Client for DocuShare and DocuShare’s mobile-printing and cloud-printing support

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By Kevin Lightfoot, vice president, Corporate Communications, Xerox

Pesky Zombies, they’re everywhere.

Every day, one of those droning, stiff-limbed creatures are getting in my way.  Every single time I turn on the television – Zombies.  I walk into the bookstore – again Zombies. Heck, even Brad Pitt is getting into act. And when I take my dogs for a run in a quiet, deserted meadow, they get distracted and start chasing after what seems to be nothing…or maybe…Zombies?

Thankfully, the only place I haven’t encountered Zombies is at work. While these non-thinking, single-purpose beings may be ideal in some sectors, such as sports commentary or marriage counseling, they wouldn’t be suited to our services industry – on either side of the table.

If you think I’m using the recent popularity of Zombies in a shameless attempt to make a point, well, you’d be right.  Relevancy is the valid currency here.

The best clients are curious, inquisitive counterparts who enjoy the challenge of thinking through a business challenge to simplify how they meet their customers’ needs. They know their customers best and need the advice of equally innovative colleagues who know how to apply technology. That’s where we fit in.

With about 140,000 employees in the Xerox ranks, that is a lot of brain power. Like Xerox Research Fellow Lalit Mestha who is working on a way to use common web cameras to monitor a newborn’s vital signs without hooking the infant up to machines.  Or saving us time in Los Angeles by installing a program that allows us to find a parking spot without driving around in circles like, well you know, like Zombies.

You don’t get to this point of innovation without asking the right questions. Or as John Cleese of Monty Python’s Flying Circus once said, having the discipline to be creative and allowing us to think differently.

So when trying to get to a different solution, Zombies need not apply.

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By Ed Gala, vice president, Marketing, U.S. Client Operations, Xerox

Sitting on a flight from LA to Chicago, I have plenty of time to ponder this question:  What do airlines and hospitals have in common?

The question is top of mind following a meeting with Ann Rhoades, co-founder of JetBlue airways, and Xerox healthcare clients.  Rhoades thinks the parallels between the two seemingly disparate industries are so compelling that she now devotes much of her time to transferring lessons learned from pilots and passengers to physicians and patients. 

Fascinating stuff, though as I facilitated the round table discussion between Rhoades and IT leaders from large hospital systems like Molina, HCA and UCLA, I wondered if others would agree about the similarities of managing airplanes and hospital beds.

And just when I feared the conversation would crumble, a spirited discussion broke out!

It seems pilots and doctors both tend to have strong opinions about things — and carry the responsibility of human lives in their hands. They are disciplined and driven by data. And they don’t care much for muckety-mucks from headquarters telling them what to do and how to do it.

When you enter a hospital or an airplane you have to check your attitude at the door. You relinquish control to the experts. You are required to provide personal data.  Your clothes are stowed in the baggage compartment or in plastic bags marked “patient belongings.”

Suddenly, I’m very grateful that while I’m a bit sore from sitting in a cramped center seat, at least no one forced me to wear one of those dreaded robes with the open back side.

As we make our descent into O’Hare, I’m reminded that turbulent times in all kinds of industries are forcing companies to share best practices and innovative strategies necessary to succeed in a rapidly changing marketplace.  Xerox clients in LA talked about pairing tech-savvy younger docs with more tenured colleagues who might not be as nimble with new tools of the trade.  And I don’t mean scopes and scalpels; I’m talking iPads, digital storage, scanning and security software.

Rhoades says they do the same kind of “pairing” in the airline biz where younger pilots bring new tech skills to the cockpit, sharing and learning alongside captains who earned their stripes many years ago.

Strategic partners are also playing a role, bringing cross industry expertise and change management skills to the organizations they serve.

Simulated training, electronic records management, compliance, sustainability, BYOD, mobility, competitive and cost pressures … all common challenges between aviation and healthcare.

Wheels down in Chicago, I’m thankful for a safe, on-time arrival.  And I have a doctor’s appointment coming up soon.  Who knows, maybe someone from the airline shared a useful insight with someone from my healthcare system.   I certainly hope so.

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By David Cummins, senior vice president and managing director, Parking and Justice Solutions, Xerox

No parking? No problem. New York is indeed the city that never sleeps. And – as The Chairman of the Board once pointed out – if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. And it’s all true, particularly where parking is concerned.

At a press conference I attended recently in the Bronx, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced two pilot programs that will allow motorists to pay parking meters remotely and view real-time curbside parking availability all via an app on their phone or online.

In the first pilot, motorists can pay for metered parking via a smartphone app (PayByPhone), the internet or by telephone for 264 spaces along 18 blocks in the Bronx, as well as at the New York City Department of Transportation’s Belmont Municipal Parking Field.  Need more time on the meter? No problem. The new technology will warn motorists when their time is about to expire via e-mail or text messages, and allow them to pay for additional time easily and quickly, up to the posted time limit.

The second pilot involves the analysis of various technologies for parking guidance – sensing and counting the number of occupied spaces in NYC and then using an app to direct drivers to the least congested blocks.  Xerox is helping in that effort.

We’re very excited to be involved in this pilot. If you follow this blog, you may have noticed we’ve rolled out similar successful parking programs in Indianapolis and Los Angeles. The key to modernizing a parking program and making it great is to make parking simple – from finding a spot to paying for it. We’ve helped hundreds of governments around the world improve their parking programs and what New York is piloting could be life altering for drivers if adopted city-wide.

Who knows? You could find you’re king of the hill; top of the heap; and your little town blues melting away. New York is helping take the pain out of parking.

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