Slashdot Asks: Is Paperless Office a Dream? (betanews.com) 260
A new report by Danwood, which surveyed 1,000 office workers, almost half said that they print something every day and 84 percent said printing things on paper at work was an "important aspect of work." In the past, we have seen a trend growing at many workplaces where things are moving increasingly digital, implying strongly that our reliance on paper must be reducing as a result. From a report: Danwood even cites a recent IDC research which says 49 percent of business expect their print volumes to increase over the next two years. Eight in ten (80 percent) of respondents say they need paper documents to get their job done. "Despite a move to digitization, organizations remain reliant on print", says Danwood CEO Wes Mulligan. "Businesses are mindful of unnecessary waste when it comes to physical documents, but print and digital will continue to coexist in today's organizations. The easiest way to strike a balance is to look at ways that you can better integrate paper and digital processes to have a real impact on efficiency, productivity and cost reduction."What do you guys think? Will we ever hit a stage where paper will have a minimal footprint, if at all, at workplaces?
Update: Reader argStyopa shares his views on why paper is here to stay, and for good: (1) Paper is portable and readable in all circumstances. I don't need to fire up a reader, connect to Wi-Fi, turn on a laptop, whatever: here's your piece of paper, read it.
(2) Paper is durable and fixed-format: if I put a paper in a file and come back 10 or even 100 years later, barring catastrophe, it'll still be there. The vagaries of non-cloud storage, and (for the cloud) the evolution of e-storage and e-doc formats means that even if I HAVE the file, I might not be able to read/open it. I have enough trouble opening now 25-year-old docs from my college days plunking on a MacSE.
(3) It's harder to edit paper: simply put, e-docs are easier to fake, generally.
Update: Reader argStyopa shares his views on why paper is here to stay, and for good: (1) Paper is portable and readable in all circumstances. I don't need to fire up a reader, connect to Wi-Fi, turn on a laptop, whatever: here's your piece of paper, read it.
(2) Paper is durable and fixed-format: if I put a paper in a file and come back 10 or even 100 years later, barring catastrophe, it'll still be there. The vagaries of non-cloud storage, and (for the cloud) the evolution of e-storage and e-doc formats means that even if I HAVE the file, I might not be able to read/open it. I have enough trouble opening now 25-year-old docs from my college days plunking on a MacSE.
(3) It's harder to edit paper: simply put, e-docs are easier to fake, generally.
It's pointless (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the paperless office is pointless. Sometimes physical paper cannot be replaced, and the convenience cannot be matched.
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Re:It's pointless (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, it cannot be hacked
It can't easily be remotely hacked, but plenty of paper-based information has ended up where it shouldn't through physical exploits. It can be photographed or copied without leaving any trace in any log files.
and won't crash
It will, however, burn. It's also quite susceptible to flood damage, as many organisations who relied on paper documents without remote electronic backup have discovered to their cost.
It's also not searchable or readily encryptable.
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I think the paperless office is pointless. Sometimes physical paper cannot be replaced, and the convenience cannot be matched.
I print something about once a month, and it is almost always needed to interact with either the government or a lawyer. Otherwise, my office is paperless. There are appropriate uses for paper, but business documents are not one of them.
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I print something about once a month, and it is almost always needed to interact with either the government or a lawyer. Otherwise, my office is paperless. There are appropriate uses for paper, but business documents are not one of them.
Same here. The only physical paper I interact with is government forms - and those are increasingly going electronic. I also had no physical paper involved in leasing my current apartment, other than a cashier's check at the beginning.
All business workflows are electronic. Audit trails are everywhere, and protected well enough to satisfy government auditors.
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I think the paperless office is pointless. Sometimes physical paper cannot be replaced, and the convenience cannot be matched.
The only thing that is pointless here is the unending desire to kill trees for no valid reason.
You have no idea how many times I watch office workers print something only to scan it back to a digital format again.
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The only thing that is pointless here is the unending desire to kill trees for no valid reason.
You have no idea how many times I watch office workers print something only to scan it back to a digital format again.
And yet we see endless people who print out from those same digital copies.
As for killing trees, well unless you live a place where the energy is from a renewable source such as hydro. Well you're trading killing trees to burning coal which pollutes the atmosphere and the mining of coal destroys the forest to a point those same trees cannot grow back because the soil is contaminated with the coal (looking at you North Carolina). So what's worse?
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In healthcare we do this all day long. Because nobody wants to pony up for some sort of terminal / PC everywhere we work. Sure, *some* stuff is on a tablet. Other stuff is on Windows and doesn't run on a tablet unless you are a Level 9 masochist. Print something out, have someone sign it, scan it in.
Sure, there are paperless solutions to that but they're expensive and don't always work. (Why hello Adobe, it's you again.) But paper is fast, cheap, functional
and recyclable.
Besides we have lots more ser
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Kaiser has *nearly* made it to the paperless hospital point.
Routine doctor visits etc. are paperless. ER / Hospital in-patient still has some paper while you're in crisis, once stable that paper is scanned in and you're paperless again.
my notes on my papers can't go on virtuals (Score:2)
and some of those notes can mean the difference between wrecking a box of bits or recovering it.
Re:It's pointless (Score:4, Informative)
Paperless is already the norm in offices where I work, and has been for the last decade. Then again, I make videogames for a living, so maybe people who create a product made up of bits and bytes are used to working entirely electronically. Our internal documents are online in Wikis or Confluence, we use online bug trackers, we use e-mail and instant messaging and web chat to communicate. And of course, the work we do is entirely digital too.
Sure, we occasionally print things out for convenience, but that's the rare exception, not the rule. I can think of perhaps two occasions in the last six months I've done so, both times for meetings in which I needed everyone to follow along with my presentation. Not everyone has a portable electronic device that's synced to company e-mail (I prefer to keep my phone personal). If that ever becomes the norm, then I'd have just e-mailed everyone the docs ahead of time.
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I think the paperless office is pointless. Sometimes physical paper cannot be replaced, and the convenience cannot be matched.
I quite disagree, for a bunch of reasons given below.
- Except maybe the legal field, electronic documents are accepted everywhere. Also, just like they have people sign on touchscreens, the convenience of paper can be matched on those. Especially if one has a touchscreen laptop, and for some reason, has to draw/write, rather than type
- Given how much more distributed everything is, electronic rather than physical distribution of information/documents is more important than ever. There are now even autom
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While I agree the correct digital tools are expensive and not easy to use. We print things out daily at work. The pick tickets for pulling warehouse parts, packing slips and invoices are the bulk of the printing. Going all digital on the warehouse would cost $200,000 in Erp licenses and hardware. Packing slips and invoices still will be printed too. Yes we email invoices whenever possible. 90%of small businesses don't integrate with computers well enough to force that though.
Actually home owners are gene
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The paperless office is not the same thing as a paperless warehouse.
There's some things that digital can't easily replace. That pile of work on my cosy little desk, those minutes from that boring meeting, a red inked mess of a report someone asked me to comment on... that is what the paper-free office is looking to replace.
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I probably print about 30 sheets of paper total a year at work. At home I gave up even having a printer, because I'd forget to exercise it witjh aj ob at least one a month and the ink cartridge would go all screwey for not being used.
I use more sheets of notepaper for scribbling temporary notes than I do sheets of laser printer paper.
Around the same time as the paperless bathroom (Score:2)
Around the same time as the paperless bathroom - or washroom, restoom, WC, toilet or whatever your local venacular is for the place where one voids oneself.
Re:Around the same time as the paperless bathroom (Score:5, Funny)
Look you just need to know how to use the shells. That's it.
And stop swearing at the auto-ticket machine. It's running out of slips to print on.
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Come now, Slashdot is ENTIRELY paperless. . .
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um, some place have had those for years: washes your bottom and dries it too
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um, some place have had those for years: washes your bottom and dries it too
Yeah, and there probably are a few actual paperless offices too.
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Sooner or later, I think we ought to have bidets
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"Some folks don't like change, but I don't care, Estevan now h
Tactile (Score:2)
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Also, we have all these applications that allow us to make really professional looking documents. Sometimes I print stuff I create just because it looks so cool!
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Agreed - especially when I'm annotating something, or in a meeting where people are telling me what they want - I can type it on my laptop (which I have to unlock from my desk, lug to the meeting which is often in a different building, lug it back, lock it back in...), which I can't annotate or diagram (I probably could with newer hardware, something like a surface book maybe, but then my company needs to get me that). Instead I grab my notebook, have my phone handy if I have to look up an email that was s
Shipping documents (Score:4, Informative)
The only thing we regularly print is shipping documents and invoices for customers that don't have electronic invoice acceptance. Outside of these items, maybe... 1-5 pages per month are printed?
All incoming paper documents are scanned and shredded.
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Our approach as well with making sure that the documents are properly organized for easy access.
To push suppliers and customers to accept only electronic documents, we charge more paper invoices (put it as a line item on the invoice) and offer immediate payment to suppliers that will take payments electronically.
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You shred documents? What do you do in case of legal trouble. A scanned image might be not considered proper for the legal process, as you can manipulate it.
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You shred documents? What do you do in case of legal trouble. A scanned image might be not considered proper for the legal process, as you can manipulate it.
And you can manipulate a paper document too.
Legal proceedings generally do work on a balance of evidence. Show up in a civil suit with a bunch of printouts of email messages discussing the terms of the contract and you will be believed over the someone who brings nothing. Show up with something that contradicts other evidence provided for someone else, and eventually your lawyer or their lawyer will be able to build up enough evidence inplicating someone purjuring themselvs.
There are hundreds of years of le
i'd settle for competent paper use (Score:2)
Walk by any printer in any office. There'll be a stack of printouts that the originators never remembered to pick up.
Next, look at the stack of printed emails; many of which are printouts of an email reply-to chain, meaning the last mail has all the content of the other 20.
Then look at the people who print out a document, redline it with a pen, then type the redlines into the softcopy file they just printed out.
Personally, I blame the Electron Lobby. Those dang charge-carriers are getting way too lazy abou
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Re:i'd settle for competent paper use (Score:5, Insightful)
Then look at the people who print out a document, redline it with a pen, then type the redlines into the softcopy file they just printed out.
This is a valid use case.
Proofing on paper is vastly different than proofing on the screen, especially if for something that is final output to paper.
You're not only looking at spelling, grammar, word choice, etc. you're looking at layout, font, flow, margining, and all the other things that go into it. Add to that the tactile response of a good pen...
Yes you could use a stylus and tablet... but it's not the same. Eye fatigue is higher with screens as well.
-nB
Just like the optical drive discussion... (Score:2, Insightful)
"I don't print stuff, so there's no way anyone anywhere could possibly need to print either."
Fax (Score:2)
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Sure, right after you kill the entire medical AND legal systems.
Or, perhaps, just after Trump's inauguration. But I repeat myself.
Re:Fax (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe someday we can finally get rid of fax machines.
Good luck. The legal profession (and extensions of them, such as courts, mortgage brokers, etc) refuse to move on from them. And the medical profession to a lesser extent.
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They would all *happily* move on from them, but the legal precedent (and IIRC there are also explicit laws on the books) is that faxes are legal documents while e-mailed PDFs are not.
-nB
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Maybe someday we can finally get rid of fax machines.
Haven't heard of eFax? You can do that now!!!
Yes. It will never happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
TSIA.
Since I need to add more to satisfy the /. posting god, my point is that
1) paper is portable and readable in all circumstances. I don't need to fire up a reader, connect to wifi, turn on laptop, whatever: here's your piece of paper, read it.
2) paper is durable and fixed-format: if I put a paper in a file and come back 10 or even 100 years later, barring catastrophe, it'll still be there. The vagaries of non-cloud storage, and (for the cloud) the evolution of estorage and edoc formats means that even if I HAVE the file, i might not be able to read/open it. Shit, I have enough trouble opening now 25 year old docs from my college days plunking on a MacSE.
3) it's harder to edit paper: simply put, edocs are easier to fake, generally.
There are a host of things that paper isn't: searchable, stored effortlessly taking no space, easily (instantly) sent to someone else not present, backed up in case of loss, there are probably a ton of others. But the fact is that for what paper does, and what's important in a business/legal context, it's pretty irreplaceable.
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TSIA.
Since I need to add more to satisfy the /. posting god, my point is that
1) paper is portable and readable in all circumstances. I don't need to fire up a reader, connect to wifi, turn on laptop, whatever: here's your piece of paper, read it.
2) paper is durable and fixed-format: if I put a paper in a file and come back 10 or even 100 years later, barring catastrophe, it'll still be there. The vagaries of non-cloud storage, and (for the cloud) the evolution of estorage and edoc formats means that even if I HAVE the file, i might not be able to read/open it. Shit, I have enough trouble opening now 25 year old docs from my college days plunking on a MacSE.
3) it's harder to edit paper: simply put, edocs are easier to fake, generally.
There are a host of things that paper isn't: searchable, stored effortlessly taking no space, easily (instantly) sent to someone else not present, backed up in case of loss, there are probably a ton of others. But the fact is that for what paper does, and what's important in a business/legal context, it's pretty irreplaceable.
1) I can carry over 10 years of corporate digital documents. Can't do that with paper.
2) The only reason that you can't open 25 year old documents is because you saved them in a proprietary format. I have documents older than that that I can still open. The formatting may be a bit off but I can still read them.
3) GPG or PGP if authenticity is important to you.
I'm not against paper but it's the decisions you make that create your limitations. Using undocumented or proprietary file formats is like printing o
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"The only reason that you can't open 25 year old documents is because you saved them in a proprietary format."
When I wrote that, I knew someone would try to dispute that. Sure, *.txt, woo.
Documents are about more than just text. I can't think of a common documentary format from 30 years ago that will support: ...and still be commonly readable today.
- embedded graphics
- tables
- complicated formatting - footnotes, etc.
For a piece of paper, it's not even a question.
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"The only reason that you can't open 25 year old documents is because you saved them in a proprietary format."
When I wrote that, I knew someone would try to dispute that. Sure, *.txt, woo.
Documents are about more than just text. I can't think of a common documentary format from 30 years ago that will support: ...and still be commonly readable today.
- embedded graphics
- tables
- complicated formatting - footnotes, etc.
For a piece of paper, it's not even a question.
PS, EPS, PDF, TIFF, JPEG, TXT, CSV, CSV
Yes TIFF and JPEG are image formats and marking them up has the same effect as writing with a pen on a document totay.
We didn't have much choice since we are dealing in times where the technology was not fully developed they did/do a better job of representing the printed word better than most new formats of today (saving a print file for an Epson printer will not print on a Brother unless you use a supported format which is what I'm saying). Saving a PS will print on
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TSIA.
Since I need to add more to satisfy the /. posting god, my point is that
1) paper is portable and readable in all circumstances. I don't need to fire up a reader, connect to wifi, turn on laptop, whatever: here's your piece of paper, read it.
2) paper is durable and fixed-format: if I put a paper in a file and come back 10 or even 100 years later, barring catastrophe, it'll still be there. The vagaries of non-cloud storage, and (for the cloud) the evolution of estorage and edoc formats means that even if I HAVE the file, i might not be able to read/open it. Shit, I have enough trouble opening now 25 year old docs from my college days plunking on a MacSE.
3) it's harder to edit paper: simply put, edocs are easier to fake, generally.
There are a host of things that paper isn't: searchable, stored effortlessly taking no space, easily (instantly) sent to someone else not present, backed up in case of loss, there are probably a ton of others. But the fact is that for what paper does, and what's important in a business/legal context, it's pretty irreplaceable.
1) This is really only an issue if you're out of range of WiFi and Cellular. Who turns off their computer anyway?
2) That's great for documents that are relevant a year after they were printed, but most documents probably become irrelevant within days of being printed.
3) That's a minus for most documents and use cases.
I think the main reason why paper is still widely used is that UI:s aren't good enough, software and hardware.
The one thing I still need paper for on a daily basis is for scribbling out throwaw
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1) In an office situation the same can be true of any IT solution. If your tablet is always close by and your WiFi is always on, and ... wtf do you mean by turn on a laptop? These devices are always on. In the wider sense what you say is true but in a controlled environment I can take my note and send it to you faster than you can come and get a sheet of paper from my desk.
2) A grand problem in the office is not the storage of paper, but the lack of storage for it. There are very few documents that need to
Only a dream to those who can't think big (Score:2)
I see a lot of paperless discussions often revolve around one part of a process or one thing. Replace a single system, or put out PDF readers that can sign and call it paperless.
No.
If you want paperless you need to think from the top down, all work processes and all interactions. Documents needed to be easier to retrieve than reaching down to the filing cabinet. People need to be able to jot down notes with a tablet and hit send faster than handing someone a piece of paper. Your processes can't rely on havi
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Globalization ends use of paper (Score:2)
At my company, we VERY rarely print anything, or receive anything on paper. I think that's related to the fact that we have offices in several countries, with which we interact regularly. Paper is poor way of getting information from Texas to Colombia and Ukraine. As more companies become geographically dispersed, their use of paper will reduce further.
"Hard copy" will survive... (Score:2)
...until there is universal, reliable and inviolable security on digital systems.
The printed document is still more reliable than the hard disk or flash drive, all care having been taken in all cases.
Courts still require "copies" of printed documents, not the assertion that a flash drive is representative.
We've got a long way to go. Technology is about what SELLS, not about the best long-term solution for endemic problems.
nope, never, give up (Score:2)
Too many people who need to print out the Excel sheet, add the numbers on a desk calculator, fax it somewhere where it arrives as a over email PDF, print out that PDF so it can be faxed somewhere else to get it to someone who needs it.
Overall YES - but privately - no. (Score:5, Interesting)
The newspapers (physical format) is struggling like mad, it's dying a hard slow death that the editors and older people desperately tries to fight rather than deny. Deny it - is what they tried to do 15 years ago, today they KNOW better, but really struggle with digital media. For this reason it will still live on, but only for a limited period of time (untill the old folks go to bed forever, cynical - but true).
My neighbors are roughly around 70 to 90 years old, they've lived here practically all of their lives, most of them have a computer but they confess they rarely use it, they basically use it to read mails from their kids and pay bills via online banking because they are too old and tired to go to the bank physically, if they had an alternative (someone drove them) they'd prefer that (yes, I'm basically the neighborhood IT guy so I hear them!).
Personally I absolutely HATE my physical mailbox. There are basically TWO things I find in there, one is more overpowering than the other and needs constant attention, namely ADVERTISEMENT in paper form. For me, they usually go directly from the mailbox to the paper-recycling dumpster can we have, I don't even bother to read them, they are more a nuisance than practical. But the OLD people love them, it's basically their only source of information (and I kid you not!).
At work we sometimes print copies because in advertisement we NEED to see if the ads look good on print, this is proofing and we can't really do without that process. But we use as little paper as we have to, the boss hate wasting print colour and paper, and we don't like the manual handling of the endless paper mountains either, so the less - the better.
At home I like to decorate the walls with my own printout collages of the 80s memorabilia, cartoons and video games, so it's basically used as a decorative wallpaper printer for me, other than that - I rarely if ever print anything. In fact...I print so little, that my Hewlett Packard color laser printer 2600n has only had ONE set of cartridges in it since I bought it 10 years ago, and gathers dust under a chair somewhere in the hall, I take it out if I need to send some hardcopy to the government (who are still super-old-fashioned in Sweden and wants everything in hardcopy prints).
I sometimes work for the school system as a substitute teacher when I'm out of graphics jobs at work, and at school we use the copier heavily, it gets a run all day long, that's because the teachers are in love with giving kids assignements on paper since it basically keeps them occupied all the time. This ain't going away anytime soon either.
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Interesting points, but I don't think anyone is belittling printing proofs, or decorations... someday we might all have digital walls to decorate digitally, but that day is not today. It will be neat, like in the movies, to tell your wall you want to be at the beach, or see a sunset, or whatever. Cool. But not today.
As far as school goes, it's a good point - even in college, you may not be able to expect everyone to bring a laptop to class. Sure, for some schools it's required, for some courses it only
Tech docs (Score:2)
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Paper? What's that (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been working in a paperless office for 6 years now. I don't even bother with scratch notes anymore, just OneNote and/or a whiteboard + phone camera
Our fax/printer has been out of toner for 2 years... and so far nobody has needed it (out of ~20 people)
The only paper product we get anymore is the crap that comes in the mail slot we throw out... I don't even think about it anymore. Which is odd really, place I worked at before generated mountains of paper (even for scrum, we were using cardstock and pins on a cube wall rather than an app, g'gah, how did we even generate reports back then???)
Anyway, the only thing I miss is doodling I guess.
funny you should ask (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah... not going away any time soon (Score:2)
What gets me, though, is that printers in general are still a PITA to operate and maintain.
How many times have you gone to print something and found that:
- The margins are screwed up
- The wrong paper tray was selected
- The duplexing was toggled the wrong way
- You meant to print color but forgot to switch it from B&W
- The driver doesn't understand your stupid Adobe PS document and prints 100 pages of jibberish before you realize what's going on.
- A paper jam caused the jobs to back up so instead of unjam
No, it just needs the Boomers to die off (Score:3)
First of all, the vast majority of things they print don't require printing in the first place. As an almost stereotypical example, we have one lady who:
* Prints out every PO (that she creates in our ERP system) and puts it in filing cabinet #1.
* When she gets a packing slip, she manually matches them up, staples them together, moves them to cabinet #2, then records the PO as received in the ERP.
* Then when the invoice comes... Ditto, cabinet 3 (if she receives it by email, she actually prints that so she can physically staple them together).
* When she sends payment to the vendor... cabinet 4.
* Finally, when the payment clears, she stamps it as processed and files it away forever in the dungeon, "just in case" she needs to reference it sometime in 2046.
I've tried explaining that she can run a recon right in the ERP for every single phase of that, including attaching emails/PDFs/whatever directly to the workflow, but she doesn't "trust" the computer (aka "once upon a time I screwed up and deleted something, so I'll just do the whole damned thing by hand until the end of time").
Second, also related to trusting computers - I've shown people how to print to PDF. Nope, computer might crash (mind you, we have reliable offsite backups going back to the frickin' 1980s).
Finally, people seem to have a disconnect between the idea of computer files vs paper files. How could they ever find that one invoice among thousands of PDFs? Because y'know, you can't just organize them exactly the same way you do paper files, never mind the fact that you can just search for any bit of text in the document and almost instantly find every reference to WidgetCo going back to the beginning of time.
The paperless office will eventually exist. It just won't arrive until the Boomers and their hatred of trees finally gets the hell out of the workforce.
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Came to basically say the same thing. My community-college programming students cry out, "How did you copy all those lines at once?" (shift-select, you know). Their understanding of backups, reliability, security, etc., is nigh-nonexistent.
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I work with quite a few people who "need" to print things every day.
First of all, the vast majority of things they print don't require printing in the first place. As an almost stereotypical example, we have one lady who:
I think it helps to be cognizant of the fact that many of the older folks have more experience than you do, and that those experiences are probably more diverse.
Maybe you are too young to be aware of this or maybe your work doesn't involve it, but in the 80's and 90's, many businesses required their workers to save all paper invoices going back 10 years for audit, in chronological order. Electronic records were not acceptable because of formatting and technology changes over time (no PDF) and because often
Scratch paper (Score:2)
I realize this isn’t quite on point, but the fact is, I have to do a lot of my mathematical derivations by hand, on paper. I would really stuggle if I were forced to ALWAYS use software to do this, even if it did a lot of the work for me. I could pay for Mathematica, WolframAlpha, and/or Matlab, but those really irritate me. I often use sympy, which is freaking awesome. But sometimes it’s just nice to use pencil and paper.
More on point, if I need to carefully read a document, and I want to f
Paperless is entirely achievable (Score:2)
Where I work now, we are entirely paperless, and have been for the past 3 years. It's kinda funny because there's quite a few salespeople that apparently canvas the offices around the area that I work looking for places to sell printer or copier supplies and when we tell them that we don't even have a printer, they are invariably stunned.
Anyways, while I'm aware that it's unusual... it's entirely possible to do if the company decides that's the way they really want to go.
The first step to doing it is
Surely it mostly depends on what your job is (Score:2)
As a software developer, I hardly ever print anything out. Last time was maybe 6 months ago.
The only paper on my desk right now is a notepad, 2 post-it note pads and an article about watermelon.
Routinely, the only thing I print. . . . (Score:2)
. . . .are documents that require a signature. Which get signed, and then scanned to PDF. . . .
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Already there... (Score:2)
I don't need paper for work. It probably helps that I telecommute, so there is never anyone handing me a piece of paper. When I travel, tickets are all on my phone. Timesheets are online, invoices are online, paychecks are direct deposit. The closest I get to paper is random PDFs.
requirements for retention of hard copies. (Score:3)
also paper works when the power it out.
Ignoring the clickbait headline. (Score:5, Insightful)
One more article that poses a false dichotomy. It's not a binary either or. No office or worker can exist in an absolute paperless existence. Even the "paperless office" has to let paper in the door, has to scan it or OCR it for digital retention. And when the power goes out, paper will pop up as a pretty workable temporary fallback *tool*.
And that gets me to the second point, that getting stuck in the "either / or" binary means one stops asking what is the best tool for the job. I try to print out as little as I can. Most things stay digital - until I start designing things or need to jot stuff down super quick. When I'm designing from scratch, trying to structure things, loads of cheeeep paper and good marking tools blow the doors off of digital tools. I can rough out the general structure of anything from a landscape design to a database schema, on paper, faster and better than I can click.
But not everything starts best analog. Most long form writing seems better for me to start and stay digital. I can think and edit text better and faster on screen. For me the real question is what tool is best for a given task, *for a particular person or organization*?
Never, unless we learn to write for online reading (Score:4, Insightful)
Having been in the web industry for 15 years now, working for 3 different 4000+ employee companies, I've seen several attempts to "go digital".
In each project, I warn the C*O that success of the project does not rely on million-dollar document management software or high-speed scanners, but on creating original documents that are easy to read/understand online.
And I am ignored. And I watch the project fail.
Online reading (reality is: "online scanning") is a whole new world to the office. It's a huge-culture change that needs to happen.
We've all been taught to write the hamburger essay. That doesn't work online. Online requires getting to the point quickly, chunking information with headlines, short paragraphs.
-- If you don't create documents that are easy to consume online, then people will print them off to read them --
Another important success factor: a robust search engine and proper architecture. Again, more things that are ignored and not taught to make paperless a reality. The whole self-service "everyone can add their own document" feature is a horrible idea. Dedicate a resource to manage search and navigation of your document repositories.
You need a properly managed office ... (Score:2)
... to reduce paper to the absolute minimum. If that is the case, being mostly paperless is a piece of cake.
Bills, contracts, offers, tax-reports and other legal documents, the occasional fridge-note and perhaps Scrum tickets are worthwhile printing and - most imporantly - worthwhile printing well. With good professionally preconfectioned typography and layout. That probably will never change or only in a few decades.
Everything else is utterly pointless to have lying around in paper and a huge waste on top
Not in law, finance or healthcare (Score:2)
The industry I work in (air transport/airlines) has a few things holding it back from being paperless. Non-paper bag tags are only starting to be adopted, and aren't universal. Paper boarding passes are optional these days provided people have mobile check-in apps on their phones and choose to use them. I'm still old school and use paper boarding passes because it's easier to get past the TSA...one less bulky thing to present. (Back when travel agents were selling tickets directly to consumers instead of th
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I'm in law, and it really depends on the kind of practice you run. In some aspects of my practice, I'm completely paperless thanks to my trusty Surface Pro 3. I can mark up and revise documents more easily on the screen than I can on paper using the excellent pen and drawing features. In other areas of practice, we are required by law to mail things to people, so there is no getting around the paper there. Real estate transactions do require a lot of paper, but it's all done in one big pile at the closing;
Make the users accountable (Score:5, Interesting)
Not my office (Score:2)
I'm an engineer, so I print schematics, refer to them and mark them up during debug. And a lot of other stuff. However, I'm happy to do stuff digitally when I can make it work.
But my company's business software? Not so much. I'm required to print every expense report, tape the corresponding receipts to it, sign it and put it in an IN basket. Not by my company, but by their tax accountants (and, ultimately, the IRS), who insist on paper.
Then, there are Purchase Orders. We have a digital way of entering
We about as ready for a paperless office (Score:2)
Possible but major hurdles (Score:2)
It is quite doable but some significant things have to happen.
1. Open standard for e-documents. PDF doesn't cut it. And there has to be an easy way to create them, something like Markdown but better.
2. Ubiquitous storage. Basically cloud storage has to become something like a shared social distributed system that all have access to.
3. E-Readers have to be cheap, light, fast and have long battery life -- and standardized like a PC so many companies can provide them.
Not a dream, just the tech is only halfway (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember that shot in "Avatar" where a guy makes a vague gesture of waving a document from his desktop screen and towards a pad in his hand, and the document does exactly that? Those folks have finally replaced paper - not because of that one thing, but because it implies a document is always with you, effortlessly and seamlessly.
It goes much further than that. Paper documents you've printed off and carry with you can be *found* in a couple of seconds. During a meeting if you say, "I've got it right here"...and more than about four seconds elapse before you are showing that document or reading aloud from it, the conversation moves on past you. And it takes more than four seconds to find a document in a file system; less than four to shuffle through up to several pieces of paper (we can hold up to seven things in mental RAM, remember) and pull something out. So printing something serves as a proxy for making it more accessible.
At the moment, if you want to share that electronic document, you go through multiple steps, again breaking up a conversational flow - or it's impossible because your pad is Android and their's is iPad, or something. Or your meeting guest isn't on the corporate LAN. But if the guest brings six copies on paper, the sharing is accomplished in 15 seconds of passing-around-the-room.
Most printing I saw in the last few years related to meetings and passing out copies; or it was training materials. When you make a vague gesture waving the document on your pad to all the other pads in the room, and "it just works", a lot of modern printing needs will go away. When everything is searchable as quickly and quietly shuffling through some paper with half an eye while staying in a conversation, more will go away.
The problems will be solved one at a time. What people still haven't absorbed about computer use is the UI dictum that a four-second delay causes loss of focus and an eight-second delay starts the user off on different tasks - in a meeting, task #1 is to pay attention to the meeting, so the job of the pad simply doesn't get done and paper is brought next time. After we finally get sub-second, or at least less than 4-second solutions to all the things that paper is good at, use will finally decline. Sail had a long overlap with steam, too.
Fully: Not yet. Mostly: It is here today (Score:2)
I co-own a small IT company with 7 people and the amount of paper we print out and receive has really diminished in the last 10 years.
We really do not print anything in terms of internal things as a lot of our work is at a customer location and involves several people over time so having things online and available to everyone at need has been a great help. Having it on paper would mean outdated versions and so on.
Of the about 60-70 invoices we send out monthly only one is on paper at their request.
In an av
Architectural engineer here (Score:2)
I have a "paperless office" and do 200+ small jobs a year. I still go through about 2 cases of Letter and Ledger paper (combined, for one engineer), plus a 500' roll of 36" wide bond a year. But I don't have any permanent hard copy storage. I've got probably 6 copies in digital format in various online and off-(or near-)line backups. It's far cheaper than storing the real stuff.
But no matter how I've tried to get rid of paper, when I throw on a set of coveralls to go into the 15" tall crawl space of a 150
The only way to make a process paperless... (Score:2)
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Well which is it, 8 in 10 or 80%?
Is there some system where "8 in 10" would mean something other than "8 out of 10" which also means 8/10 = 0.80 = 80% ?
I guess in base 9? Base 16?
Or should I have just used the smart-ass response of "yes"?
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8 in 10 and 80 out of 100 are different numbers. One is ten times larger.
What colour is the sky in your world? They are only different numbers the same way that 80% and 0.8 are different numbers, or that 3/4 is different from 75 out of 100.
I suppose if you are talking about survey responses 8 out of a total of 10 responses might indicate less confidence of how well you have captured the entire population's opinion compared to 80 out of 100 responses or 800 out of 1000 responses, but absent clearer wording "8 in 10" probably is indicating a ratio of respondants rather than an abs
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Which is why, when their phone dies or they can't get a connection, they can't figure out how to read a paper map.
Yes, yes, we're talking about offices but the point stands. Instead of having a physical piece of paper in ones hand which can be immediately shown with others, we have to wait while these folks hunt through their phone or computer to pull up a document on a small screen. It's also easier to read a paper document than on a
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This is a *real* issue for the mellineal crowd.
Paper map in a strange city and they might as well be hopelessly lost... even though their destination is literally only a block and a half around a corner.
Solution: tabletop RPG where the map is integral to the game. Get your kids interested in gaming like D&D, GammeWorld, etc.
Does some awesome things:
* interaction with your kids not electronic based
* teaches critical thinking and cost benefit analysis
* teaches ways and means
* teaches map reading
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GammaWorld... /sigh
Does not teach:
* spelling
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Sadly the modern RPGs have mostly forked into storytelling games and combat simulators. Neither of which teaches map reading, nor critical thinking and cost benefit analysis (beyond googling build optimization for the combat games).
I still love the old school though, and the success of Pathfinder shows that D&D 3x still has staying power for a system that can teach useful things, even if it's not as crazy open-eneded as really old school RPGs.
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sadly, it's still a dream. As sending a note through an e-mail takes so much more time than handing over a piece of paper to someone, finding the information on a note that you've written is much easier than going through hundreds of e-mails, having connectivity issues, hardware issues and battery issues... a pen and paper is "cheap". there is too many things that are more easily done with pen and paper or printed on a piece of paper that we still have many years ahead of us that we will still retain the ability to use our writing skills, for the better or worse...
Finding written notices is only easier if it was relatively recent and you know roughly where to look -- just try finding that note you wrote down in a conversation with Bob 6 months ago. Paging through 100 pages of handwritten notes is going to take longer than typing "from:bob after:2016/4/17 before:2016/5/16 subject:widgets"
And if you're at home but left your notepad at work (or vice versa), then you're not going to be able to find it at all.
That said, I find I retain more information when I take notes
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Last time I printed something was for my home mortgage. For work? Only when HR wants me to sign something. I feel like the whole, I NEED PAPER!!!! Is a boomer thing. My mother literally printed everything for my college applications and funding. After college she hands it me and asks me to file it away. I spent an hour shredding all the paper... Paper sucks and there isn't a need for it anymore.
There are more things in home and office, AC
Then are dreamt of in your philosophy.
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Wait until you do business with any government agency, have a QA program, or get audited by other companies. You need a paper trail.
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Seashells (Score:2)