The Future of Documents

It sounds like my enthusiasm for the Xerox-ACS acquisition was not as universally shared as I candidly hoped. Lots of reactions about it, some good, some not so much.

In any event, I am not a specialist by far, but if you want to know more about it, you can can check out this very good post: “The ACS-Xerox deal – was it a smart move?”. Excellent and very convincing material (at least to me!).

The part I like the most is a commentary from the Wall Street Journal: “Xerox hopes to marry its document technologies with ACS’s paper-heavy processing work. t can use its overseas presence to expand ACS. Xerox also is paying a reasonable price of about 13.5 times consensus fiscal 2010 earnings, well below the 29 times that Dell is paying for Perot. Investors may be overreacting. It’s not a smooth and easy road, but I am confident it will pay off.

… but Xerox is doing a pretty good job. This Greenbiz article confirms that Xerox does more than “preaching” about sustainability, but also makes significant savings through internal “green” initiatives.

More than 50 projects were presented for internal Earth Day awards, which helped Xerox eliminate 1.3 million pounds of waste and reduce energy use by 500,000 kilowatt hours – this while saving $7.3 million.

Whether finding creative ways of recycling packaging, replacing refrigeration systems, or adhering to the Forest Stewardship Conucil Chain of Custody, these innovations and knowledge are then shared across the corporation – and with customers.

After discovering the great news that Xerox was now considered the top “green” outsourcer (all domains included), I wanted to figure out how we were doing on our legacy market: electronics.

The latest Greenpeace “Guide to Greener Electronics“, published yesterday, nails down companies like HP,  Dell and Lenovo, but Xerox does not appear.  HP dropped significantly in this quarterly report, from being “middle of the pack” one year ago, to being 14th out of 17th (although for all of its electronics divisions). Unfortunately, this ranking seems to be mostly about PCs, not so much about printers or other electronics, so Xerox does not appear.

However, searching for more information on the topic, I stumbled upon GoodElectronics.org, a very good resource on the topic. This then pointed me to Covalence’s Ethical ranking.

Geneva-based Covalence tracks the ethical reputation of multinationals by sourcing information from the media, civil society, and companies. The most active criteria in 2008 have been: Environmental impact of production, Social sponsorship, Waste management, Information to consumer, Eco-innovative product, International presence, Downsizing, Product environmental risk, Labour standards, and Anti-corruption policy – so Sustainability weights strongly in the final ranking.

Great news: Xerox made it to the 5th position in this year’s ranking, second only to Intel in the “Technology” sector. The full table of results can be found here.

The report published by The Brown-Wilson group positions Xerox as the top ranking green outsourcer ! This report explores how new economic dimensions are impacting the growth of the sustainability technology sector.

Xerox is ranked “greenest” in the Document Process Outsourcing area by its clients, which is not too surprising. The criteria used included sustainability metrics, social and economic principles, environmental principles, LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating system, and Six Sigma.

But even better, when asked to nominate which outsourcing companies are the “greenest”, Xerox comes first with an astounding 440 nominations! That puts Xerox in front of Accenture (429), CSC (403), CapGemini (396) and IBM Global (390). HP / EDS comes 10th, with 259 nominations.

That is a huge progression from last year’s 35th position in that same ranking. That shows that customers now see Xerox as the trusted outsourcing partner that can take them on the journey to the “Less Paper Office” – reducing overall carbon footprint of their infrastructure, using less paper, less energy, generating less waste, but also optimizing their Document Business Processes to remove paper – when appropriate- and improve overall quality.

That’s what we call “Smarter Ways to Green”: click on the video below to learn more.

Higher than Eric Schmidt, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs: Anne Mulcahy, Xerox CEO, comes 4th in TechRepublic’s “top 10 visionaries and executives who made the biggest impact on the business technology world in 2008“.

Anne is praised, amongst others, for “pushing innovation with expanded research and development efforts“.  And for taking bold moves for Xerox: “Ironically, Xerox consultants now show companies how to save paper and reduce the number of printers” – “Less Paper Office“, but more generally helping our customers prepare for the future of documents.

An interesting article in the New York Times on Xerox and the Paperless / “Less Paper” Office. 

Technologies mentioned include Extensible Interface Platform, or the direct access to workflows from the Multi-Function Device, Xerox Mortgage Services, Xerox Litigation Services. The only advanced research project mentioned is “Intelligent Redaction“, a PARC technology which controls access to sensitive information.

Also interesting is the mention that Xerox has joined the Information Overload Research Group, an organization in charge of “reducing information pollution” and lists things like feeds, voice mail, social networks, interruptions, blogs, Web 2.0 services and search engines as “polluters”.