Tracey Koziol: Redefining the Future of Work with Cutting-Edge Solutions

Xerox Corporation is a technology leader focused on the intersection of the digital and physical world using automation and next-generation personalization to redefine productivity, drive growth and make the world more secure. Its workplace solutions, smart multifunction printers and ConnectKey ecosystem provide cloud-based apps that automate paper-based work-flows. Xerox is recognized as the global leader in digital production print, hyper personalization and workflow software. 

Tracey Koziol, is the Senior Vice President, Global Offerings at Xerox. According to Tracey, she has been lucky enough to work for some great companies, including General Motors, Dell and Motorola. At Motorola, Tracey led the creation, design, and launch of the RAZR portfolio, which was the largest selling phone platform in the company's history. Over her career, she has focused on operational excellence and leadership offerings; ranging from integrated supply chain, research and development, marketing, strategy, and running multibillion-dollar businesses. At Xerox, Tracey is responsible for its core technologies, the largest source of revenue for the company. This includes strategy, portfolio planning and execution for production and workplace solutions, everything from a small desktop printer to a 60-foot-long production press, including the workflow, software and apps that help provide end-to-end solutions for its customers. 

Since the beginning of her remarkable career, Tracey learned that every discipline and every person has a role to play in change. She emphasises the need to build trust, not only within the group, but also with stakeholders, including customers, to create an environment where it is okay to make mistakes if one learns from them. For example, at Motorola, she drove product development on a music phone. However, the development took far too long, and the market window was missed. Tracey did shut the project down but admits she should have done so months earlier. That mistake taught her to constantly review the market, understand the customer's expectations, and adjust accordingly in real-time. Another lesson from the experience was to always identify the product roadmap with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – then keep a maniacal focus on those milestones and indicators. 

Revolution to Change the Mindset 

Tracey believes that understanding how different disciplines impact operational simplicity, offering development and innovation are fundamental to make change. To make positive change, a leader must understand all the moving parts needed to make that change. The key is to analyse the situation and note the opportunities for change, where are the pain points, roadblocks and things which are preventing progress. Then bring ideas, solutions, and enable the talent to deliver the change.  

Another challenge a leader may face is with a company's mindset. When Tracey joined Xerox, she knew the people were going to be something special in terms of their loyalty, capability and belief in the company. The company's values were front and centre – putting the customer first, diversity and inclusion and innovation at its heart. But she felt they were stuck, not moving fast enough. Product development was evolutionary, not revolutionary. The company needed to change its mindset about the nature of work. Moreover, it was not about an office, but about a workplace, wherever that was and wherever there was a need to access data and work solutions. Tracey changed the name of the division from Office Solutions to Workplace Solutions and focused on the Cloud, with data available anytime, anywhere that could be accessed by a mobile phone, tablet and PC as well as at the printer device. This thinking puts Xerox at the intersection of the physical and digital page where data can be transformed to provide analytics and increased productivity. A simple name change spurred a new mindset. 

Transformational Leadership to Motivate Others 

Tracey believes that to inspire the team, a leader must be bold, inclusive and open to new ideas. A transformational leader must influence people both in and outside of their team. The buy-in from an admin., to the leadership team, and everybody in between is critical to success. The entire organization needs to understand the goal and the key markers to achieve that goal. It is important to be authentic and be first in and last out. A leader must be transparent in their communications and motivate people to do better than their previous best. To Tracey, that means every voice must be heard and to encourage diversity of thought as well as to take risks. For example, when Tracey first came to Xerox, the company offered 16 desktop solutions on 7 different platforms with 7 user interfaces. Changing that was said to be too difficult. But it was unacceptable as the team wasn't giving the customer a similar experience across the portfolio and it was driving large cost inefficiencies. It had to change. Today, it's down to 2 platforms and a single user experience, which drives operational improvements, reduces cost and complexity, not only for Xerox's supply chain, but for its partners and customers as well. Now, customers have a consistent experience using Xerox's products and the workflows that they rely on. It was a bold move but a highly successful one for the company. 

Digitally Intelligent Innovations for the Market 

Creating a portfolio that has value to customers has many inputs. Xerox is constantly working with its partners and customers to get a deep understanding of their needs. Staying abreast of trends and technology advances, while keeping a keen eye on legislation and certification requirements. Customers are looking for ways to make their workers more productive and innovate the way work gets done. The multifunction printer (MFP) is no longer a peripheral but a digital intelligent workplace assistant, adding value beyond printing. Xerox's smart-MFPs are linked by its ConnectKey ecosystem and the Xerox App Gallery. Just as apps are downloaded on a smartphone, ConnectKey workflow automation apps can be downloaded to the MFP. For example, a law office can scan documents into one of the AltaLink or VersaLink MFPs and have automatic redaction of protected information needed for digital distribution to the customer, courts and repositories that meet all legal requirements. The workflow is automated in the Cloud by the MFP and software. Xerox has such apps for key verticals such as healthcare and education, and horizontal apps for businesses like accounting, content management and translation. It has MFPs for the home with full ConnectKey capabilities, which have proven to be important for its customers to keep business processes running even if many employees are currently working from home.  

In its print production business, Xerox provides its customers with application differentiation and hyper-personalization. Digital print embellishment is the fastest growing area of production print. Most printing today is done in four-colours: cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). Usually adding specialty colours, metallics or embellishments, takes extra steps and processes on multiple devices. Xerox toner technology allows for printing gold, silver, white, clear and fluorescent colors on most Xerox presses. This enables print providers of all sizes and budgets access to this lucrative embellishment market. 

Leveraging AI to Drive Innovation 

Xerox has a steep history of innovation, from the creation of xerography and laser printing to the many technological breakthroughs from the company's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which just celebrated its 50th anniversary. Analytics and data come in many forms. AI, data and automation play a key role in production print. When Tracey first came to Xerox, she didn't realize the wonder of print and the extreme complexity of what must happen to put ink and toner on a page. At present, Xerox production presses have terabytes of data flowing across them. The analytics and software teams are solving issues such as mis-firing jets in an inkjet nozzle (with an output of almost 4 billion drops of ink per second), so there will not be a single bad page in any one of the 300 images per minute flying across the press. Xerox's XMPie software can also personalize every one of those pages individually at that speed. Each page can have a different name, address, or coupon printed on it.  

AI can be used to help knowledge workers reduce repetitive tasks and improve workflows. Xerox is working to help companies with writing request for proposals (RFPs) for bids. Many companies handle hundreds of RFPs on a monthly basis, and it is extremely time consuming, yet so important for retaining and winning new business. Using AI-based document models and natural language understanding drives faster and more relevant document creation and a more productive collaboration across a team of authors and editors. As more data is collected on successful and unsuccessful bids, this informs and adapts the response for the next RFP, improving the win rate. 

A business is only as strong as its weakest link. Xerox takes a holistic view of security to provide powerful features, solutions, services, security dashboards and compliance reporting. It partners with the industry leaders in security McAfee®* and Cisco®, to prevent unauthorized intrusions, detect malicious attempts and protect data and documents. That's why the 10 largest global banks, all 50 U.S. states and the 10 largest universities have chosen Xerox. It's why Xerox is the only managed print services provider earning the highest U.S. Federal government security approval, meeting the strictest NIST security standards. 

In the words of Tracey, "To be a leader in technology innovation and change, you cannot be narrowly focused on your own function or role in the process. You must understand how a whole solution works and how it is connected in an offering and how a customer is going to interact through many endpoints." 

Tracey says though it may sound a bit trite, she takes this to heart – tomorrow will be different than today. This is especially true for an IT company. The transformation from the physical such as paper to a digital process is well underway, though companies are at different stages of that journey. It's a big opportunity as so much information comes across Xerox devices and software. Through analytics, robotic process automation, improvements in digital workflow, companies can remove the mundane, repetitive but important tasks, and automate them to make simple workflows. A customer's data can be analysed to provide analytics and insights about areas of opportunities to grow and simplify. The need to print will always be there, and Xerox will continue to strive to be the best at printing the physical page, but it's the value beyond print that sets Xerox apart. The company's technology offers a secure way to on-board data and create content and workflows that are suitable and unique to the customer. It's an intelligent workplace. Whether one is working from home, in an office or mobile, they need a seamless experience and access to their data and workflows. 

A Roadmap for the Future Leaders 

Addressing the emerging woman leaders, Tracey feels that there is no better time for opportunity for women. They must believe in themselves and very importantly, they must be heard. They don't need to be over-loud or over-direct but to find a way to communicate with their peers and management that is right for them. Tracey says she never felt at a disadvantage being a woman in leadership. In fact, it gave her added strength. The ability to listen and communicate is an area where a woman could well have an advantage. The thought that there are no bad ideas came naturally to her. Tracey advises young women to take their goal, put it on a vision board – then ask, how do I get there? Do I need more education? Do I need more experience? Maybe that requires changing departments or even companies. Tracey truly believes that when one feels comfortable and stops learning on a job, it's time to move on. She says, "have a roadmap that moves you forward, set your own path and don't let your career just happen – you should drive it." 

Some additional advice: Tracey never forgets to do a quick read-up of technology and trends every morning and believes it's best to live in the present to move with confidence into the future.