January Observations: Looking Ahead and Enjoying Coming Full Circle in the Research/Analyst World

also published in The Hard Copy Observer, January 2011

Observations: Looking Ahead and Enjoying Coming Full Circle in the Research/Analyst World

[January 25, 2011] I totally endorse indulging in extensive reflection during December and up through the ringing in of the new year, but with a new January getting well past its half-way point, it is no doubt a good time to stop the looking back, at least excessively, and start actively looking forward. And like with the art of listening, I believe there is the passive version as well as the active variety. I like making at least a few personal and professional resolutions for the new calendar year and anticipating what might actually qualify as truly “new” in our lives and surroundings coming up in the twelve months to follow.

With that said, this column will include an inevitable look back, as I integrate my own personal history with that of the industry over the past few years and the exciting announcement earlier this month of Lyra Research becoming part of the Photizo Group (click here). In addition, I feel that I have to share my personal legacy of some of the high points leading up to this announcement, beginning with my move from the corporate side (25 years with HP) and joining the research/analyst world with my initial Observations column for Lyra in December 2005. It is hard to believe, but with this column, I am starting my seventh calendar year of monthly Observations. I have already wallowed in the memories of most of those columns, but this month’s news brings a clear-cut reason to think back a little more.

After that initial column in the traditional “Hard Copy Observer” format (and also available online via my blog), I had a number of well-wishers among friends and family. But the one unexpected e-mail, or at least the first, came from a gentleman I would eventually get to know much better, by the name of Edward Crowley. I still have that e-mail archived and accessible, and (at the small risk of embarrassing him), here’s what he wrote: “Jim, I enjoyed your article in Hard Copy Observer. Are you consulting now? Best Regards, Ed Crowley.”

At the time, Ed was a few months away from officially founding the Photizo Group, and I responded that yes, I was doing a little consulting, but through further e-mails and phone calls, it was clear to me that he was a driven visionary with ambitions for doing some new, big things in our industry and was a person I easily connected with. As my apprenticeship with the Observer continued, we kept in touch, and I was pleased that I could do some contract work in the area of writing and analysis for Photizo, beginning in 2007, following the firm’s official launch in 2006. I also featured some of Ed’s wisdom in two of my Observations columns in 2007, in musings on Corporate Printing (Managed Print Services or MPS was just emerging as the “universal” term it has become). (see Observations: Corporate Printing, Served and Managed, and Observations: The Changing Role of the Printed Page). With a foot in both Photizo and Lyra camps, I helped make introductions in 2008 that led to a Lyra/Photizo alliance that officially kicked off with Ed’s appearance as an MPS keynoter at the Lyra Symposium in January 2009, which I proudly blogged about (***see illustration). Since then Lyra and Photizo have continued a conference-speaker exchange, and members of each team are frequent sights as attendees at the other company’s conferences.

Ed Crowley addresses the Lyra Imaging symposium in January, 2009

It would be reaching for me to compare my journey, including these last six years, with my chronological contemporaries, who number among the tech industry’s greatest ever. But as I reflect on my 2011 reading list, which included the Walter Isaacson-penned Steve Jobs biography that I have mentioned in previous Observations, Paul Allen’s autobiography Idea Man, and even Mark Cuban’s ebook, How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It , I am thrilled by their history. And my times with HP, and more recently with Photizo and Lyra, have left me also with a great sense of history and perspective in our part of the tech business.

It seems that this bringing together of the legacy and foundation from Lyra Research and the vision and innovation of Photizo Group, now combined under one figurative roof, is something I am very fortunate to have been witness to and part of. My journeyman-ship with the Observer led to being named Senior Editor last year, and now in that role, I move to the combined firm, with the prospects of an exciting ride continuing. As a professor of marketing in one of my lives and in my business career in another, I have frequently reminded those around me about the “power of partnering,” whether through formal tie-ups like mergers and acquisitions, minority investments, or simply forging strategic alliances with complementary organizations. And once again, I am living that advice.

Back in Rancho Mirage - Lyra Imaging Symposium 2012

As the "official blogger" of the Lyra Imaging Symposium for a number of years now (though not all 15!), I will be at it again, but this year, over at the Imaging Insider blog. We'll post a daily summary there, but offer more "real time" bite-size pieces on Twitter.

While you can keep track of my Symposium tweets in the right-hand column here, suggest a more effective way is to track the hashtag #Lyra12 on a conventional Twitter app or the web site itself (twitter.com).

December Observations: TagMyDoc—A New Way to Share Documents, with Lots of Great History

also published in The Hard Copy Observer, December 2011

Observations: TagMyDoc—A New Way to Share Documents, with Lots of Great History

TagMyDoc – A New Way to Share Documents, with Lots of Great History!

In the spirit of the “Year in Review” stories the team at the Hard Copy Observer has been working on this month, I wanted to take on something similar for Jim Lyons Observations, and look back over my year or two’s worth of monthly columns to see what might jump out as worthy of further mention, especially where several (at the time) seemingly disparate items now fall together to form (a now) obvious pattern.

But then a new app for the iPhone, from a small company in Canada, came to my attention and it pulled underneath it so many different themes I have explored lately, including the following:

• Mobile Apps and Smartphone Pervasiveness
• Cloud Imaging and Storage
• QR Codes
• Social Media
• Document Management

And it also had an historic legacy, going back in our industry, which as regular readers will recognize is one of my favorite aspects of a story as well.

It started with one of my favorite weekly features, from online tech-news source, Business Insider. On December 10, the weekly “Here Are The Best iPhone And iPad Apps You Missed This Week” by Ellis Hamburger, alerted me to the new app ScanMyDoc, and in fact had it in the second position in their coverage, right behind the long-awaited iPhone version of the extremely popular iPad app, Flipboard (see “August 2010 Observations --From the Magazine Rack and What a Difference a Year Makes!”).

Xerox Smartpaper technologies that go way back (see 1994’s NYTimes’ piece, “Technology; Smart Paper Documents For the Electronic Age”,  http://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/10/business/technology-smart-paper-documents-for-the-electronic-age.html) came to mind as I read the description of the app and its companion web-based document solution, “ScanMyDoc lets you share documents using QR codes - TagMyDoc.com is a new website that lets you print out QR codes on documents, then save them to the cloud. Using the ScanMyDoc app, anyone who scans the code on your document can instantly download it. It's a cool and secure new way to share stuff. Plus, the app keeps track of your entire QR code reading history.” (http://www.businessinsider.com/best-iphone-ipad-apps-10-2011-12#scanmydoc-lets-you-share-documents-using-qr-codes-2)

 

So much more than another QR code reader, this seemed to be a fully thought-out solution from Montreal-based Knova Web Technologies. I downloaded the app, sought out the TagMyDoc.com website and uploaded a Word document, retrieved and printed it complete with its identifying QR code, and was able to use the iPhone to retrieve it from the cloud, all in just a few minutes. I had to find out more!

A good email exchange with Knova principals Gabriel Deschenes, CEO, Julien Leroux, Marketing Director of TagMyDoc and JP Desjardins, Communication Director, follows, as they responded to my questions via email.

___________________

JLO: How did you come up with the idea for the solution?

Knova: In a digital world, it is surprising that the process of sharing physical document is still quite tedious (anyone used a scanner recently ?). We wanted to find a way to make the paper document sharing process simpler and easier.

Before TagMyDoc, here was no way of sharing printed documents with people unless you sent them to a link to a server that hosted the original file. Even with today’s shortened links, remembering any URL can be difficult since it is easily forgotten once you need to get the document.  You can still share it with Facebook, Twitter, [see “Observations September 2009: Document Management with Twitter? A Start Anyway”], or email.  But to open the door for real-life sharing of documents, we used the QR code to tag the documents because it is the easiest and most popular barcode in the world [see “January 2010 Observations -- From the QR Code sandbox — and will QR Codes help printing?”].

 TagMyDoc.com uses history to describe their highly evolved document management scheme

So one day we come up with an idea, lets create an app that automatically tag some documents with QR codes that link to the doc you have in the front of your eyes. That is why we built a tool to easily tag your documents and provide people with your tagged document, a public link to it and the QR code pointing to your document. With this system, people can simply scan the tag to download the docs.

JLO: Do you have a few "use cases" where the solution really shines?

Knova: A lot of people are doing some presentations all around the world right now. Those people have others who want the presentation documents, typically PowerPoint. Since they didn’t have TagMyDoc when needed, they had to send emails with attachments to each of those wanting it.

You can expect presence in schools also, and we have a couple of stealth projects that we prefer to keep it for us for the time being. Expect partnerships, extensions to popular software and applications and further implementation of document management in your daily life.

JLO: What is the future, including how do you make money?

Knova: We aim to have as many users of our service as possible by making TagMyDoc the easiest way to share documents in the digital as well as in the real world.

For pricing plans, you can go see for yourself at http://tagmydoc.com/register. We also plan to provide solutions for businesses that will allow them to make use of the TagMyDoc platform into their own segregated network. It offers more cloud storage, enhanced features, add-ins etc...

Another neat addition for Premium users is the ability to batch-tag documents. With testing from the development team, we were able to tag 150+ documents in one batch upload without any hiccups, just to show the power of the TagMyDoc platform.

For the beta launch of TagMyDoc, a Premium account is only $1.99/mo and a Premium Plus account is only a buck more at $2.99/mo. We believe in micro-payments for our customers so that’s why these are incredible prices for the features you get. We plan to support the other popular Office application, Microsoft Excel [in addition to the “coming soon” Word and PowerPoint add-ins]. Tagging Excel files will be very easy. An added benefit of Excel is that you will be able to specify the cell and column of your tag instead of selecting between corners. We plan to make further integration with ScanMyDoc, our QR code scanner, the fastest one in the App Store.

JLO: Do you have plans to work with other cloud storage sites or document repositories (Scribd comes to mind – see “Observations May 2008 – Scribd, the YouTube for Documents?”)?

Knova: TagMyDoc’s primary use is to tag documents as mentioned. Because of wanting to keep track of your documents, it became a hosting service as well. It quickly became more important for us to make this a hosting service without neglecting the tagging that goes on, so we added features like folders for organizing your documents, sharing documents, sharing folders, deleting documents and folders, renaming folders, password-protecting documents, settings, batch uploading, versioning of documents. Because people see Scribd, Dropbox, Box.net as a general file hosting and sharing service, we can’t say that we are in the same space. But we are already being approaches by some of those to add the TagMyDoc solutions to their applications, so for sure we are looking for a partnership but waiting for the most valuable for us and the other companies.

JLO: Are you familiar with past efforts in printing/document management that have inspired or offered "how not to do" insight (Xerox Smartpaper comes to mind in this case)?

Knova: Yes, we took a look to previous inventions that were done in the printing/sharing documents industry. Especially when you’re making a patent, you have to look to the art within from other patents in your domains. So then we knew about what was available before TagMyDoc and how it is different from the others’ inventions. The things we always founds with other inventions such as Xerox Smartpaper, is that there was a big education of the market to be done, people need to act in a different way and buy other instruments to benefit from the inventions.

TagMyDoc use technology such as QR codes, which is the most commonly known and used 2D tag, it also depends on Smartphone and cloud computing. To benefit from TagMyDoc, we wanted peoples to use technology that they already know and use and most importantly, like! At the beginning we were thinking about creating 2D tags that can be only read by our own QR reader app, Scanmydoc. But we judged that this was a “how not to do it” way, even if we would have more Scanmydoc users by now. We are thinking long term and this way it is making this app easy to use and practical for everyone.

___________________

As of two weeks following the Business Insider review, the ScanMyDoc app still has not warranted a user rating or review, but as the Knova executives acknowledged, these solutions take some time for education and awareness, even in the case of building upon existing standards. It is an appealing solution to me, if only because it incorporates some many technologies and solutions I have covered in the past several years. It is also interesting in revealing changing industry priorities – for example launching the smartphone-based solution first, with the Microsoft Office versions to follow – not something that would always have been the case! It will be interesting to keep an eye on this firm and its apps/solutions to see how things develop!

November Observations: The Lasting Power of a Good Strategy…Or Two!

also published in The Hard Copy Observer, November 2011

Observations: The Lasting Power of a Good Strategy…Or Two!
by Jim Lyons

[November 29, 2011] This is a story—actually two stories—about networking and the staying power that results from good strategy development. This combination led to one of my personal career highlights of 2011. The series of events, between coincidence and sleuthing, ended up leading to some much longer range reflection that resulted in some gained wisdom, at least as I see it, that is worth preserving and passing along.

I Have Seen That Somewhere Before

This past summer, I sat through an interesting presentation about the “future of work” and its implications for higher education. The webinar and the included materials were the result of work by the research branch of my employer from the education side of my life, the University of Phoenix, where I teach undergraduate- and graduate-level marketing and economics. Our Palo Alto, CA-based research group, with collaboration from Stanford University and the Institute of the Future, had produced the study, the first in a series actually.

As my colleagues and I sat through the presentation, the proverbial light bulb went off in my head as I focused on the presentation graphics—I had seen this formatting somewhere before. Post-seminar, I had to know if the slides were the work of David Sibbet and Grove Consultants International, who had served me and my team (dubbed the BLAST team) so well in 1994, when in the middle of my 25-year HP career, I led a team ruminating on and recommending plans for the future of the printer business (see image below).

Graphics from a Future of Work presentation started my sleuthing

An e-mail to the head of the Phoenix research group confirmed the graphics work had been led by the Institute of the Future (another consulting firm familiar to me from HP days but not from the particular project I had in mind). Some digging around with Google and then Amazon led me to Sibbet and a book he authored in 2010, titled Visual Meetings, with back-cover blurbs from Institute of the Future sources, so the trail was really warming up. Then finding my long-ago colleague on LinkedIn, I had a direct connection to at least satisfy my curiosity and potentially revel in the “small world” nature of having the same consultant working for a present employer as well as a previous one, nearly two decades prior.

The wait for a reply allowed me to go back to that 1994 effort with a talented, eight-member cross-functional team I had the pleasure and honor to lead, with great top management backing and interest. Over two months, and with the help of Sibbet and his magical “graphical facilitation” process (as well as other experts, both internal and external to HP), we came up with a meaningful historical perspective (on what was then the ten-year history of LaserJet) and blending that with developing trends in the broader market, came up with some recommendations for our business and its direction for the next ten or more years.

Though easiest to remember, I recalled that the strategy development was not just about the charts and graphs, although the oversized charts were invaluable communication tools in their final form. Rather, the many intermediate steps over the course of two months that involved the eight team members and many experts contributed to the foundation of the recommended strategies. With the internal experts’ input (and resulting buy-in), the recommendations were more-or-less “pre-sold” because they were the result of the collective process and not an “out-of-touch” external team of consultants.

As those thoughts began to galvanize for me, I got an exciting reply from Sibbet: he remembered me and my team and we just happened to be the subject of the first chapter in a new book, this one titled Visual Teams, that he was in the final stages of writing. Sibbet subsequently asked if I would mind looking the draft over and adding some edits/additions.

What Were Those Strategies?

Visual Teams covers the strategic development process at HP some 17 years ago, with recommended strategies still valid



Though I left HP a little more than six years ago, today, as senior editor for The Hard Copy Observer and with a close eye on the entire printing and imaging business and special attention on its perennial leading firm, HP, I felt very qualified to participate in the editing process and contribute to the content. Sibbet had done a masterful job in recalling the strategy development process flow, and I was able to add precision to the set-up (i.e. why was the BLAST team commissioned?) and the outcomes (i.e. what were the recommended strategies and how did they fare over the test of time?).

I have often recalled that the timing of that team’s work in late 1994 was fortuitous in providing the opportunity for the team to identify future trends, as they were just becoming apparent, especially with a closer look. For example, the appearance of the World Wide Web was becoming quite apparent (though commercial online services like AOL were much more prevalent at the time) after four years in its infancy, and e-mail was clearly kicking into the pervasive category. (Remembering that the first ten years of the LaserJet’s success had come in no small part from being a typewriter replacement for the creation of business letters provides a good example of the change at hand, as this transition to e-mail and other electronic forms of communication would seemingly leave a hole in demand for printing, that could perhaps, but not assuredly, be made up elsewhere.)

Even e-books were emerging on the horizon, with a little careful examination, and I remember we used a text copy of Project Gutenberg’s “Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,” stored on a 3.5-inch floppy, to make the point that centralized printing, the model we coined “print and distribute,” was giving way to a “distribute and print” alternative. Beyond the technology, we also saw that corporate customers of HP printers were a different category and that the services side of things should be prioritized—the message was not just all about the best new products but rather providing a stable printing environment. We also helped flesh out, based on work at HP Labs and some other colleagues at HP’s Imaging and Printing Group (IPG), a “paper pie” that showed how a small, single-digit percentage of print was actually being done digitally and that a huge opportunity existed to capture traditional printing moving to one or another form of digital.

Fast-forward to 2011, and HP’s current printing and imaging strategies are very solidified around 1) printing content from online and mobile sources, 2) managed print services, and 3) the graphics-arts opportunity based around the analog to digital conversion of print. With a liberal interpretation of what the BLAST team came up with in 1994, those trends are very consistent with our recommendations after a two-month collaborative process.

HP’s strategy at the end of 2011, as expressed to Lyra Research (and others) at the firm’s HP Analyst Immersion Event in October, is based on four trends.

• content explosion;
• mobility and the Web;
• everything is going digital (analog to digital); and
• service-based business models.

Today’s strategists at HP are seeing much of the same, although more fully developed, of what we saw at the beginning of 1994 and are vigorously pursuing many of the same strategic initiatives we recommended. Does that mean that these trends are “old hat” and not the right ones? On the contrary, at least from what I see, these trends are the right ones. To go one better than our 17-year strategy span, none other that Sibbet himself just blogged about the 23-year-old iPad strategy, based on a recent Forbes piece (click here).


But back to the book, which came out in October and even includes a box with a “Note from Jim Lyons” at the end of the first chapter where I express a version of what I have recalled here, about how the Personal Press and Corporate Printing strategies from 1994 live on at HP in 2011.

Find more of my posts at Lyra Insider blog

While I continue to post here, at least monthly, and also direct my tweets this way as well, I also am a regular contributor at the Lyra Insider blog, including this post from last week, on the first of the end-of-the-year awards and Memjet's honor.

October Observations: Steve Jobs Invented Desktop Publishing…and Photo Books too?

also published in The Hard Copy Observer, October 2011

by Jim Lyons

[October 28, 2011] Recently, The Lyra Insider blog included a brief reflection on Steve Jobs and his impact on the printing and imaging business (see “The Onion Brings Printer Biz into Steve Jobs Resignation Story”). Now, further reflections on his contributions and quirks following his death on October 5 seem appropriate, especially in light of all the attention following the publication of Jobs’ new biography. Some personal and second-hand memories bring his passion and understanding to light in a very industry-specific way.

According to the new authorized biography, Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, the legendary and recently deceased Apple CEO can take credit for revolutionizing six or maybe seven industries (the “maybe” being retail). Included on the list, as mentioned during Isaacson’s October 23 appearance on the American television show 60 Minutes and in the early pages of the book, which was released Monday, October 24, is digital publishing. While as a printing insider, I might refine that to desktop publishing (and in fact thought that was what I first heard during the live viewing of the show), that difference really might just come down to semantics. Along with the other industries on the list, like music, animated movies, and personal computers, desktop publishing is probably too fine a cut. After all, “DTP” as we called it back then really did ripple through and help change the whole of digital publishing and along the way, helped make the Macintosh a virtual standard in that industry.

The desktop publishing revolution goes back 25 years now (see “The Greatest Printer Story Ever Told”), and Steve Jobs’ influence during those heady early days was clear. Launching the original solution, which included the Apple Macintosh, Apple LaserWriter printer with Adobe Postscript, and Aldus PageMaker, Jobs along with his lieutenant John Scull (not to be confused with then-future-CEO John Sculley) were tireless lobbyists for DTP and its ability to transform publishing workflows. In the process, Jobs and Scully probably saved Apple and helped create a larger industry with beneficiaries like HP and Microsoft taking the solution (or perhaps a lower-end version of it) to the masses.

Following his passing, much has been made of Jobs and his “standing at the crossroads” of technology and the liberal arts, and the DTP revolution speaks volumes to that. This movement required an understanding of the full complement of technology required—the classic example (beyond the obvious Macintosh and laser printing) being Adobe PostScript’s scalable type, along with the sensitivity to style and design that was a Jobs trademark. (His passion for typography also comes out in his famous Stanford commencement speech and his discussion of early training in fonts and typefaces.) Then came Jobs’ skill as a marketer, with the strong positive push that got the world excited about the power and economies offered by DTP beginning in 1986…and his frequent trashing of HP as offering a second-rate solution.

Photobooks remain a popular feature of iPhoto ten years after its intro

A more recent Jobs innovation involves the Macintosh and Apple’s iPhoto application, originally introduced just as digital photography was hitting its inflection point a little less than ten years ago. This initiative was part of another marketing push by Apple, which was looking to define another “killer app” (PageMaker may have been one of the first) and in the process help sell more Macintosh computers, which Apple did. As part of the value proposition, iPhoto could help you organize your digital photos and create on-screen slide shows, plus the software included the ability for users to order a photobook—a professionally bound, hard-copy volume that would be produced off-site and shipped in a few days to the user. The photobook was a big part of the marketing campaign (including television commercials) that brought joy to anyone from the hard copy business that happened to notice them (me, for one). Apple continues with iPhoto today, and version 11 still prominently features this photobook capability. Similar to DTP, others have followed suit, with photobooks being one of the bright spots in digital photo printing and retailing (see “Observations: End of Summer 2011—Getting Those Memories Organized via Photobooks”).

The more interesting, Jobs side of the story comes in, though, when he personally got involved with a photobook quality issue, in the case of a very prominent customer complaint, in 2002, as remembered by Bill McGlynn, who is a former HP senior vice president and was head of the Graphics Arts group for HP’s Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) at the time, a group which included the then-recently acquired Indigo digital typesetter product line. (McGlynn is now president of Memjet Home & Office.) The Apple CEO, with his characteristic passion for design and quality, got right into the middle of a quality issue. McGlynn remembers the 2002 conference call he was summoned to, along with his boss, Vyomesh Joshi, who remains head of IPG.

According to McGlynn, “Apple’s supplier for the photobooks was MyPublisher, who used our (recently acquired) Indigo presses for their production. None other than Paul McCartney, yes, that Paul McCartney, had ordered 100 photobooks commemorating his 2002 U.S. tour. As he went through the stacks of books, individually adding his thanks and a signature, personalizing each book as a memento for crew and others who had made the tour possible, Sir Paul noticed inconsistent color and let Jobs know about it.”

“We had a magenta color shift issue at the time, especially on the older (TurboStream) machines, and Jobs wanted to know how we planned to fix it,” McGlynn continues. He remembers, “Steve even warned us, as he was in his car, returning from a dental appointment while taking the call, that he was likely to be in an even more cantankerous mood than normal.” McGlynn remembers an irate but passionate Jobs, and in the end, MyPublisher got a new (HP Indigo 3000) machine, McCartney got replacement books, and another Jobs story was born.

Apple Cards is a new Apple created iPhone app that features hard copy - in this case greeting cards

How much Jobs had to do with the very latest Apple print-prominent solution, he firm’s “Cards” app announced with the iPhone 4S on October 4, is not clear, but Jobs’ secretive side was evident with respect to our query made to HP regarding which presses are being used to print the cards. The app itself, only available recently, is a very “light” app so far, offering 20 or so card styles in a limited number of categories. Users have the ability to send a physical greeting card, customized and mailed conventionally (from Apple’s publishing vendor), to the recipient of their choice (see “Life Imitates Art”). When we asked about Apple’s choice of print vendor (and HP’s digital presses) this time, a current HP vice president became a bit flustered, commenting on how secretive Apple can be, but he assured us, with a virtual wink at least, that “the finest quality digital press available” was behind Apple’s latest hard-copy initiative.

Is the HP Indigo press still behind Apples latest hard copy initiation, Cards?

So from DTP to iPhoto to Cards (and we shouldn’t forget AirPrint), the Jobs legacy lives on with Apple and the firm’s all-important role in the printing and imaging industry. For this and everything else, RIP Steven Paul Jobs.

September Observations: “There Will Always Be a Need for Hard Copy, No Matter What”

also published in The Hard Copy Observer, September 2011

by Jim Lyons

[September 27, 2011] A quote like, “There will always be a need for hard copy, no matter what,” just cannot help but make someone perk up their ears and take notice, at least if that person is in the printing and imaging industry. This situation is just what happened to me the other day, when I was half-listening to the radio, with the other half of my attention focused elsewhere, during an interview on National Public Radio’s (NPR’s) Morning Edition. The host, Steve Inskeep, was talking to the United States Postmaster General, Patrick Donahoe, about some of the troubles that his organization, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), has been facing lately.

Donahoe currently holds the top position (how cool to have a job formerly held by Benjamin Franklin, among others?) in what is now described as an “independent agency of the U.S. Government,” and his personal story about starting his career in a lowly mail-sorting position is inspiring. But he has a far bigger challenge these days, compared to figuring out those hand-scrawled zip codes at the beginning of his career. As has been well documented in the news recently, the U.S. Postal Service is facing huge deficits and dealing with the same issues as so many other businesses, like lower demand, higher costs, and labor unrest as the result of potential layoffs, not to mention the local-office closures which seem to so often bring out the NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) response among local citizenry.

So when I went back and listened to the entire Morning Edition piece, I found some very provocative and interesting material (click here to read the transcript). Donahoe starts by assessing much of the USPS’s troubles, at least on the demand side, with respect to the Internet and the conversion of households to online bill-paying. He tells NPR, “Back in 2000, about five percent of Americans paid their bills online. Today it’s 60 percent. And slowly but surely, that first-class mail volume eroded.”

As many in our industry are accustomed, our business categories are highly dependent on economic activity. For example, beginning with the downturn of the financial/mortgage/insurance sectors in 2007/2008, overall document printing volume fell sharply, and the correlation with overall unemployment metrics is irrefutable—people not on the job, particularly in an office, are not going to be printing and copying! The USPS sees this same scenario with first-class mail as well. Donahoe said, “The key indicator for first-class mail is the employment numbers. And we thought, by now, we’d probably see, you know, six to seven percent, versus nine percent unemployment.”

Direct marketing levels are also tied to economic activity, of course, and we often hear about bulk mailing as the real cash cow for the USPS. This segment is an area, too, where we see innovations in our industry (and indeed, reported right here in the Observer), that offer more efficient, more personalized approaches to this category. And while the NPR interview did not get into that side of things, Donahoe discussed other points about innovations and opportunities.

 

USPS Innovations

Before getting into specific recent past and future innovations, I wondered whether the sometimes-mocked USPS really has the DNA to innovate. In the “History of the USPS,” a 2007 document on the organization’s past available on its Web site, the USPS states (with my emphasis), “The Postal Service has seized upon and immediately investigated new technology to see if it would improve service—mail distribution cases in the 18th century; steamboats, trains, and automobiles in the 19th century; and planes, letter sorting machines, and automation in the 20th century. Today, computerized equipment helps sort and distribute hundreds of millions of pieces of mail each day.”

Is the USPS really an innovative organization? Actually, we do not have to look too far within our own world of desktop printers to see recent innovations that the USPS developed via its own technology and with the cooperation of other firms to bring convenience to customers by letting them take more control of the printing involved in postal services. The USPS’s “click and ship” solution (***see illustration) has been available for at least a decade, arrangements with creative start-up companies like Stamps.comwww.stamps.com have endured over even a longer period of time, and more familiar partnerships include Adobe and HP.

Donahoe tells NPR (including context from before and after that column-leading quote above), “The Internet is the absolute—that’s the change…We think we are a business that’s got a very big future. Number one, there will always be a need for hard copy, no matter what…We also think that there’s a need for the postal service in the digital world. The digital world, right now, you know, bill payment, bill presentment, sending stuff through the Internet is the Wild, Wild West, truthfully. And I think that we will have a very interesting part to play there in the secure messaging environment.”

The broader printing and imaging industry can certainly relate to the USPS’s dilemma in dealing with changing consumer habits and the ongoing encroachment of alternate technologies, which is mindful of the old marketing myopia example of the railroads forgetting they were really in the transportation business and clinging to the notion they were all about trains. There are vital lessons here for all of us—and after learning much more about the USPS, especially in reading about its colorful and patriotic history, I must admit I am pulling for them to succeed.

Jim is a regular contributor of news and analysis and the author of a monthly column, Observations, for The Hard Copy Observer, a publication of Lyra Research. He also blogs and tweets on developments in the printer industry. In addition, Jim is a faculty member at the University of Phoenix, teaching marketing and economics in the school’s MBA program. Past columns, links, and other musings may be found at http://www.jimlyonsobservations.com/. Follow Jim on Twitter, @jflyons.