I’ve just spent a couple of days listening to senior execs from HP describe how their printers are helping to turn their customers green.

Once you manage to wade through the slick marketing gloss and oft-repeated catch phrases, the HP strategy boils down to two points: reduce the number of printers inside your company and find ways to produce fewer pages. Hardly rocket science, but it makes sense.

To help companies do this, HP is offering to send in teams of experts to examine existing printer resources and figure out how best to streamline them. If your company has devices scattered around the office that are not needed, the HP printer hit squad will find them.

But that’s the easy part. The more complicated bit involves putting every paper-based process within the company under the microscope to determine how it can be streamlined or (even better) removed altogether.

A detailed plan is then devised showing how workflow technologies can be introduced that keep data and documents in digital form as they travel throughout the organisation. The days of faxing your expense report to the accounts department on the next floor should be gone forever.

It all sounds great, and the productivity and cost-saving benefits are clear. When you add the fact that it will also make operations much greener, it’s hard to find a reason not to proceed.

The main sticking point that I can see doesn’t have anything to do with the technology involved. It doesn’t relate to the type of printer you install or how many of them you have. Rather, it comes down to human nature.

In many organisations, workflow practices are so ingrained that changing them will involve a lot of kicking and screaming. Things might seem cumbersome and illogical to outsiders, but for those who’ve been doing things that way for years, changing can be a painful process.

For those companies wanting to ‘go green’ through reducing their paper output, most of the energy has to be invested in an honest assessment of existing processes. Once that’s done, getting recalcitrant staff to change is just as important.

Convincing them of the benefits of the changes is the most important step. You can invest in the best printing technology in the world, but if staff don’t use it in the right way, to remove unnecessary paper trails, it’s money poorly spent.

Being green doesn’t start with IT, but rather with the IQ inside a company.