From the Road

I’m in Rochester, N.Y., as I write this, attending the National Government Publishing Association conference. This being my 11th NGPA conference, I know most of the government in-plant managers here, and have enjoyed catching up with them and finding out about changes in their operations. (I did so much talking the first evening I lost my voice and have been doing a lot of whispering since then.)

By holding the conference in Rochester, the headquarters of Kodak, Xerox and the Rochester Institute of Technology, NGPA is taking advantage of the expertise of the Big Three. The group is visiting one of them each day for tours and updates.

We spent the first afternoon with Kodak, seeing the manufacturing facility where NexPress products are assembled and touring the R&D labs. Jim Langley, president of Kodak’s Graphic Communications Group, addressed the group and spent the evening mingling with members at a reception.

Other speakers talked about future Kodak technologies and about its Unified Workflow Solutions, which integrate the business, production, color and data components of a print operation. This enables intelligent automation, eliminates duplication of effort and improves a printer’s ability to analyze and report.

Still to come are an address by Public Printer Bruce James at RIT and a tour of Xerox’s facilities.

The sessions so far have given members a chance to share their experiences with taking on IT printing, adding digital equipment and getting into new businesses, like document scanning for archival purposes. Joe Tucker, of the state of Ohio, has created a mobile scanning unit of sorts—a person who travels to different state agencies with a scanner so secure documents don’t have to leave the building to be scanned. He says agencies are lining up for this service and it’s bringing in a lot of revenue.

The state of Washington’s Department of Printing is one year into a print management program, which involves assessing the printing taking place in various state departments, rightsizing the equipment and making sure printing is being directed to the most appropriate production site. In the first year this program has saved the Department of Ecology $120,000.

As I wrap up this report and prepare to send it to the office, I see that Bruce James has just joined us in the conference room to hear a presentation by Mike Wash, chief technical officer and co-directior of GPO’s Office of Innovation and New Technology. Wash described GPO’s FDsys digital content management system, which addresses authentication of digital documents, version control, providing public access and preservation. I’ll save the details for my NGPA article next month. IPG