Who's Minding The Data?

"We're managing documents from concept to distribution now, not just printing them," says Hinds. "With the ongoing changes in technology and user awareness, unless you are technologically equipped to offer customers state-of-the-art resources you will not survive in this business."

Indeed, the word is out: in the 1990s and beyond, an in-plant is expected to do much more than simply print documents. After all, at their core, documents are merely data in need of assembly, formatting and maintenance. In the electronic age, that's all easily accomplished; as a result, in-plant managers are discovering that a host of new business opportunities fall right into their forte of managing data.