Print and Output

Many services consist of generating and delivering information in printed or electronic form. Ensuring the right information gets to the right people, with full integrity, requires formal control and management.

Print (physical) and Output (electronic) facilities and services need to be formally managed because:

• They often represent the tangible output of a service. The ability to measure that this output has reached the appropriate destination is therefore very important (e.g. checking whether files with financial transaction data have actually reached a bank through an FTP service)
• Physical and electronic output often contains sensitive or confidential information. It is vital that the appropriate levels of security are applied to both the generation and the delivery of this output.

Many organizations will have centralized bulk printing requirements which IT Operations must handle.

In addition to the physical loading and re-loading of paper and the operation and care of the printers, other activities may be needed, such as:

• Agreement and setting of pre-notification of large print runs and alerts to prevent excessive printing by rogue print jobs
• Physical control of high-value stationery such as company cheques or certificates, etc.
• Management of the physical and electronic storage required to generate the output. In many cases IT will be expected to provide archives for the printed and electronic materials
• Control of all printed material so as to adhere to data protection legislation and regulation e.g. HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) in the USA, or FSA (Financial Services Authority) in the UK.

Where print and output services are delivered directly to the users, it is important that the responsibility for maintaining the printers or storage devices is clearly defined. For example, most users assume that cleaning and maintenance of printers must be performed by IT. If this is not the case, this must be clearly stated in the SLA.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 920