Winning 'Green' Hearts and Minds

The holy grail of a 'paperless office' may be just a vision to many, but one Singapore government statutory board has made significant progress by winning over the 'hearts and minds' of its employees. Ross O. Storey reports.

Change management and employee resistance were the key obstacles faced by the JTC Corporation when it undertook a major managed print services project as part of its 'green IT' journey.

Working together with Fuji Xerox, the managed print services project was deployed by the JTC in three phases across five months to refresh its printing technology. Most of the corporation's machines were more than four years old.

The JTC is a statutory board of the Singapore government. With about 1,000 staff, it is the lead agency responsible for planning, promoting and developing the Lion City's industrial facilities and infrastructure,

Since being established in 1968, the JTC has developed some 6,600 ha of industrial land and 4.4 million sq m of ready-built facilities.

Its projects include Changi Business Park, Jurong Island, Seletar Aerospace Park, Tuas Biomedical Park, the Biopolis, Fusionopolis and the newly announced CleanTech Park - which means a lot of printing and paper. In the process of establishing and nurturing Singapore's broad-based industrial property market, the JTC has housed more than 7,000 home-grown companies and multinationals.

The managed print services project, says JTC CIO Lawrence Ang, produced "significant improvements to our overall office eco-system and aesthetics" and tangible annual cost savings of more than S$100,000 (US$71,324).

PRINT JOBS CUT DOWN

The number of printing devices (photocopiers, network printers, standalone printers, fax machines, scanners) was reduced by about 85 per cent - from 454 individual machines to less than 70 multi-function devices (MFDs).

In the five months after the project completion, the number of print jobs was cut by 18 per cent (from 684,221 to 559,698) compared to the five months before. Ang says the extent of the change at JTC "was fairly drastic", so they had a Plan B and Plan C. And some of these were as simple as connecting back an old network printer to alleviate the print load.

STRONG SUPPORTERS

"We did not have to activate these plans," he says. "We also identified departments who were either strong supporters of the project or those whose current problems could be alleviated with the MFD's to be in Phase 1 and then immediately incorporated their possible feedback into the publicity track for the later phases.

"Reflecting back, it is useful to work with a partner, in this case Fuji Xerox, which is ready and capable to walk the journey with you - the journey of change, consolidation, document management and process integration."

Ang says it was a challenge to convince staff that fewer devices did not mean being worst-off: "Especially those who wanted to cling on to their existing personal printers and now have to walk further to collect their print jobs from the multi-function devices (MFDs)."

Getting the executive green light was only the start.

"The project team must ensure a keen focus on change management and communications during the planning and execution stages as the end-users will experience changes from their current way of working," he says.

EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENT

"Some end-users may even have emotional attachments to their devices to the extent that removing them or shifting them away can be a real challenge.

"Or perhaps, there are good reasons for specialised or dedicated printers to be untouched."

"To facilitate change management within JTC, we developed a multi-prong engagement plan which included roadshows, posters, training booklets, training seminars and department champions."

Ang says his approach was not to pitch this initiative as a technology or consolidation project, but rather as a process of change with solid opportunities for the organisation.

"As they say, 'numbers don't lie', so it is useful to identify the low-hanging fruit and get your facts and numbers right," Ang says.

"In addition to these early benefits, it is useful to identify the potential opportunities and payback you can reap further along the journey."

A MEANS, NOT AN END

"Even if those opportunities may seem fuzzy now, it is important that both consolidation and managed service are positioned and communicated as a means, and not as an end," says Ang.

"For JTC, the numbers from the early benefits were sufficient for the business case, so any intangible and future benefits are bonuses.

"Once we had the storyline for this journey, we went to a suitable management forum to seek executive sponsorship. It is also useful to tug at the heart-strings of senior executives with a project initiative which resonates well with being environmentally responsible by changing print behaviour, reducing paper waste, consumables and power consumption."

Winning the hearts and minds of JTC employees seems to have worked, because Ang says "the higher print speed and quality were immediately embraced by the users".

"We now have a Corporate Services Dashboard to track and communicate the detailed print usage by staff with the business heads," says Ang. "This, in turn, allows them to drive usage behavior within their business divisions."

SHARING OF DEVICES

"We are now able to advocate the sharing of MFDs across divisions as print usage is tracked back to the sender," says Ang. "More advanced features like forcing two-sided prints, watermarks and secured print, further contribute to better paper use and user experience."

He says there were on-going additional benefits from integrating various business processes with the MFDs to improve process efficiencies and staff productivity.

This thoughtful CIO is definitely a conservationist, but he believes that "industry has overplayed 'green IT' and especially so with technologies deployed in the data centre".

"I have no argument that data centres are huge guzzlers of energy and producers of carbon," he says. "But I think it is more important for IT managers to steward both their IT and business infrastructure and processes, and to introduce environmentally-sustainable practices and solutions into the workplace whenever possible.

"I like to think that 'green IT' resides in three places-in the data centre, in the office and in our minds."

Ang says JTCs 'Green IT Journey', which started two years ago, takes a holistic view to include education and awareness programmes.

Other features include recognizing 'green champions', paper-less collaboration, paperless meetings, recycled paper, server and storage virtualisation, reduced power consumption within the office, a dark data centre, a redesigned e-workflow, encouraging a 'zero forms mentality' plus using recycling bins, etc.

Ang says these all feed into the sustainable practices of the JTCs larger corporate social responsibility (CSR) programme, which he leads.

Article from MISASIA, Volume 3, 2010, Case Study p.36 - 37