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Strategic Technology Planning >> Critical Thinking
8/29/2006
Cornell technologists found what they were looking for in Digital Flip ePublishing solutions from E-Book Systems. The offering converts all of the paper reports into electronic versions that users can access with special readers that enable them to peruse the documents by “flipping” from one page to the next. (The technology is also serving a growing market of electronic magazines and catalogs.)
TECH INITIATIVE TIP
Cultures must change in order for technology change to be adopted and make a mission-critical difference: Don’t underestimate the importance of internal marketing to drive that change.
To access the electronic documents, a user simply g'es to the IT department’s home page, downloads the vendor’s FlipViewer or Mac FlipViewer software, and installs the plug-in software on his or her personal computer. Once the web-based software is on the machine, Bourdeau says that user never has to download the program again. “It’s critical for us to get this information into the hands of our users,” he explains. “The fact that our people can download the viewer and read these documents electronically, without ever having to think about a printed page, is definitely a step in the right direction.”
According to Bourdeau, his department purchased a license that allows the school to print up to 400 pages per document. Once the department exceeds the 400-page limit, it must pay a modest per-page fee. While Bourdeau declines to reveal how much the new system cost, he says that it is “40 to 50 percent less” than what the school was paying to print the triad of reports on paper every year. The marketing officer adds that at a time when issues such as global warming have put a spotlight on the health of the environment, Cornell’s IT department also has used the technology to reduce paper usage, moving closer to what many administrators commonly refer to as a “paperless” environment.
Still, this transformation has not been without challenges. For starters, while E-Book Systems boasts the ability to convert files from Adobe PDF, Page- Maker, Quark, and Microsoft Word into the online page-flipping format, Bourdeau says that some of the conversions require additional formatting. On top of this, getting users to embrace the switch in the first place was difficult. Because so many of his colleagues were accustomed to accessing and reading reports on paper, Bourdeau notes that changing these habits took a good deal of cajoling and internal marketing. In the end, however, just about every member of Cornell’s IT department has embraced the change.
“People thought they liked the old way, but now they can’t believe we’ve ever done anything else,” says Bourdeau, who suggests that at some point, Cornell may consider switching all of its mission-critical reports to digital distribution. “Clearly, this is one of those cases where technology has made it easier for everyone.”
::WEBEXTRA:: More on electronic publishing here.
Matt Villano is senior contributing editor of this publication.
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