High Technology Data Center -“What is the Product of Your Product?”

When I came into the market in 1980, fresh out of college, the high technology marketplace had hit a major crossroads. Mainframe Computers still dominated the echelons of corporate business around the world.  The Future, however was edging into view as desktop personal computers from Apple, Atari, and others edged into view, hinting that a new world might be around the corner.

1980: Data Center Printer Systems

I began at Morehead & Company in Century City, California in my early thirties, a technical consulting writer-developer. Bill Morehead was one of a group of young developers who had seen the market movement in high technology, and the growing need for sophisticated high technology product launch and development in the 1920s and beyond.

Product Launch involved introducing new, innovative products, methodologies, concepts, and technologies to the marketplace. It often included detailing the new technical-social language that the product and technology had developed, and how to employ that language in using the technology, tools, and processes successfully. Finally, large-scale innovations often introduce subtle to comprehensive changes to daily habits and manners of thinking, as well as social interactions, business processes – even available Job assignments and requirements!

By way of illustration, when Xerox introduced the 914 Office Copier in 1959, the only way to make copies of documents was Carbon paper. The rapid adoption of the Office Copier by businesses utterly transformed the look and feel of most offices. File cabinets and administrative job assignments proliferated, “information management” became a job function over time, and ultimately, how organizations created and exchanged information changed.

In 1980, the Mainframe Data Center, dominated by IBM was still the primary core of corporate computing. The established method of printing data were large mechanical devices that rolled enormous sheets through sprocket feeders to physical impact printers.

This output was not graceful, and not easily read but it served a purpose. Sizes ranged from 9.5” x 11” continuous fed sheets for standard to 15” x 11” continuous fed for massive reports.

This was an example of a result or “outcome” that was not really a business solution.  The reports that choked out of the huge sprocket-fed printers were clumsy and impossible to read, often bulky, and required constant flipping to find specific data.  If they were torn apart or broken down, the integrity of the data was lost and some kind of filing solution had to be found to hold it together.

Xerox Data Center Laser Printing

In 1977, Xerox launched the 9700, the first high-volume Laser Printer designed to meet the requirements of the Data Center. Gone were the clumsy pages and the sprocket feeders; this machine printed data directly, in high volume on plain paper, just like the established office copier.

There were other models in the array by the time of my arrival, including some new plain paper machines using a simpler, cheaper printing technology called Ion Deposition.  My job was to develop comprehensive Product Launch Delivery Guides for each Xerox Electronic Printer System, built around detailed Use Cases.

Xerox 9700 Laser Printing System, ca 1980- Printed 2 pages per second, 120 pages per minute,
7200 pages per hour.

These devices were always the workhorse of giant mainframe Data Centers, cranking out sprocket fed computer paper.

The job was to write Positioning Documents to show how the Xerox Laser device “fit” in the data center economically, and how its performance would justify its price, economically. The core of this effort was to create a variety of different Use Cases, demonstrating different print jobs with different print volumes and time/urgency requirements to showcase the power and value of the machine.

The real issue in the Positioning Documents was the Cost/Value of the machine itself. I was teaching the reader the new “technical language” of laser printing, and about the level of quality, speed and value it offered a company on a daily basis.

Once again “language” was the pivotal value in introducing a new technology to customers, and in this case that language came down to a single word.  That word was “throughput”. Throughput was a relatively simple “flow” concept that detailed how long it took a number of units (pages) to move through a system. So as I framed my Use Case examples, I always tried to express the efficiency value in hard data terms, and outcomes in terms of “throughput”

I is the number of pages contained within the system, input;

T is the time it takes for all the pages to go through the printing system, flow time;

R is the rate at which the printing process is delivering throughput, flow rate or throughput.

·        If you solve for R, you will get:
R=I/T .[3]

“Throughput” was the signature concept that the financial analysts at the customers needed to evaluate the efficiency of the product to evaluate the purchase. None of the various standard technology rates of performance or other data alone would be sufficient.

I needed them take a larger view and see that fast, plain-paper printing would make their people more efficient, and would save time at multiple places in their organizational life.

Product Value and Insight

Intangible values like this are always the hardest to convey in prefab locked down systems. I began to consistently use the phrase “What is the Product of your Product?” to prod my B2B clients to “take a larger look” at their customer expectations for performance in business technology.

Sometimes the highest product benefits values were commonplace:

·        Reliability, Speed, Dependability under pressure).

By thinking more about the effect of the product:

·        “It makes me look good to my customer” and

·        “Helps me manage errors” and even more.

More engagement with heads of internal departments brought about requests for greater detail in reporting and more timely output than the Data Center had yet offered.

The core conundrum of these projects always remained:

1.      The machines were designed to produce and output Information.

2.      None of the Machine Designers had ever defined what “Information” was supposed to represent.