And if not, is the obstacle personal, technological, or organizational? Speaking personally, I’m a long way from the paperless office, for all three reasons. I work in the healthcare industry, which is quite retrograde in some respects. There’s very much a culture of printing out presentations, so people can have them to write notes on. So even if the presentation is projected and distributed by email, as is usually the case, we still need to print out copies.
Also, it’s not the kind of place where everyone has a laptop or PDA or tablet PC at all times. So even if you wanted to go paperless, it would be kind of tough, because the enabling technologies are not ubiquitous.
And then I feel like there’s a kind of discipline to being paperless that neither I nor anyone else has tried to acquire. Sometimes we use paper in a way that’s just lazy, even indefensible.
So has anyone here achieved the holy grail of paperlessness? Or even made any real progress?
The last office I worked for was very much the paperful office. I’m sure every sheet of paper I ever saw had to be photocopied and stored in at least three different files. Not only that but my boss insisted every email had to be printed and stored in the relevant customer’s file. That would all be well and good, but for some reason, if we had a 7-page email back-and-forth, always quoting each others’ correspondence so the email got longer and longer, she felt the need to print the entirety of each email rather than just the top page :smack:. So we’d end up with a file bursting at the seams with only one or two subject threads.
We’re trying. Our incoming paper is virtually nil whereas two years ago we had a 6-month paper backlog. Outgoing paper is mainly for when the recipient’s fax cannot be reached or for corrections of something we did wrong. We won’t be completely paperless until our customers start doing all their business online, which will probably never happen.
The paperless office was basically a very flawed and inaccurate prediction from the start. Paper use has greatly increased since the advent of fast last printers available in every office. I work in IT and have two large monitors on all the time to do my work. I can display something like a report on one and do work on the other based on the information I see.
I have huge amounts of paper around at any given time. I have an informed opinion that anything close to a paperless office is close to an impossibility. Devices that look and even feel a little bit like paper have been in development for a while and may be able to catch on a bit. However, they can’t match a printed PowerPoint presentation to take notes on or anything complex that requires random notes all over the place. Most importantly, these gadget do best look at pages sequentially and printed documents aren’t usually read like that. It would take some type of revolutionary search function to allow people to flip through pages randomly and rapidly and that isn’t available yet.
That said, our mega-corp uses all the Outlook functionality possible and I can view my whole day’s meeting schedule within seconds of arriving at work and I don’t even have to enter any of it. We also have a powerful document sharing site but those often get printed out for important meetings. I don’t think we can do much more and I have those stacks of paper sitting on my desk like everyone else does.
When I started working at the large airplane company in Seattle back in the 80’s, it took reams of paper to build each airplane. Needed drawings? You would have to order the whole thing, sometimes over 100 pages just to get the few sheets you actually needed. Want to read a spec before doing a job? You would have to order a complete spec document, sometimes hundreds of pages, just to get a few paragraphs of information. Someone estimated all the paperwork it took to build a 747 would fill up the forward cargo compartment. Today we are virtually paper free. Most everything is done on a computer today. My job as a functional test tech is one of the few that still uses paper to do our work but that is going away soon. They even did away with paycheck and paystubs, everyone is required to have direct deposit and your paystub info is sent every payday by email. Want a copy? Print it out at home.
I run a 25-person software firm. Collectively we use 1 ream of copier/printer paper per month tops. We seem to get through 8.5x11 white ruled pads at the rate of 1 per person per month, but even that use rate is dropping as folks started using a new scribbling & note-taking app we got. We bought a brick of Post-Its 2 years ago & we still have 3/4ths of them in the closet. I’m not sure we own any pens at all.
Even our in- & out-going faxes never touch paper.
As far as we can see, paper is for people who don’t know how to operate more modern tools.
One of our vendors takes the signed invoices and scans them into their computer system. They had to go to court before they started the system to make sure the scanned documents were still considered legal. Much like online check images are considered just as valid as the original paper check.
