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The Myth of the Paperless Office
AdamBa writes: "The New Yorker is running an
interesting review
of the book
'The Myth of the Paperless Office', also discussing
'Scrolling Forward'. Read
it and the ever-informative
Malcolm Gladwell will
explain why paper enables collaborative work much better than computers do, why a messy desk is a sign of productivity, and give a little background on the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System to boot."
....of the book ?
Or is someone just taking the myth ?
"Any New Year's resolution?" :)
"Yep: 1440 dpi"
With paper you don't need,
Batteries
Network connection
Power plug
Monitor
Keyboard or mouse (pen though)
Paper is about the most reliable form of interoffice communication there is. You can take it with you anywhere, you can read it anytime you want. It's lightweight, and neatly folds up into a smaller space. If you need security, paper can be burned or shredded. If you get really bored, you can make airplanes out of paper.
You want games? Paper has some of the most ancient and popular games ever. Tic tac toe, connect the dots to name a few. Paper even has an intuitive interface for making your own games. In fact it's so easy a toddler can do it!
Paper in volume can be used to prop up a montior to eye level that doesn't have a stand. Have a table with a leg that's a little short? Easy enough, some folded paper under the affected leg will make that table stand on all 4 legs like new again.
Girls love paper! Write a love letter, send a card, these will allways get you more brownie points with your signifigant other than electronic methods.
Paper has been used for thousands of years, without paper, we wouldn't have the great teaching of our forfathers. Our constitution was written on paper!
Have you hugged your paper today?
mmm... yeah... You see, we're putting the cover sheets on all TPS reports now before they go out...
Draft copies are the biggest reason there will never be a paperless office. If you have a 15 page draft and distribute it to 20 people for comments, trying to organize and incorporate the comments is damn near impossible. Never mind the act of these people commenting is already 3 times harder than it would be if you just gave out hard copy. My boss decided to try "paperless drafts" for documents we were reviewing and it was an abysmal failure. If the IT department thinks it's clunky and convoluted, then everyone else won't think about it at all.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Whether or not your producing is a sign of productivity, not the state of your desk.
:-(
Darn... I was just starting to feel really productive
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
My boss had me write, rewrite, change, edit and perfect an online project request system. After all that work I had to add a "Print Document" button to the bottom of every page. Not only did they want a fully functional advanced online system, they wanted the paper trail too. And not only that, but with everyone printing out each page, the paper trail is about 10 times as big as the one sheet handed around the office.
They never gave me a clear reason for this. All I can think of is that the big bosses don't trust computers. But this is a web design company. Go figure.
MS offers collaboration with netmeeting. Multiple people can edit the same document at once. It's also built into Exchange Server 2000. Other compnies must be offering similar solutions. Why aren't IT shops looking into it?
Well...Duh...thanks for stating the obvious. Who modded this to "Insightful"...In other news, the best solution to any given problem is the solutions that works the best and the team that scores the most goals is likely to win the game.
:^)
A messy desk can be an indicator of productivity if there is a statistical correlation between the two. It is not an assurance of productivity and therefore cannot be used as a measure of productivity.
For example, an "Insightful" comment is a sign of a post with some insight into some subject or other. However, as we have just seen, it is not an assurance of such insight.
...I'm not usually this bitter...
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
When he got an email, he would print it out, then scan it, so that he could store the image in a document management system.
I have to admit that sometimes I really want to sit down with a red pen and a paper draft. When I have to send my comments to somebody else electronically, however, I'd rather work on the computer than have to retype all my scribbled comments.
There are tools for this, but they just aren't that commonly used. The best one I've found is the full version of adobe acrobat. You can print just about anything to a PDF, and then use Acrobat to draw on it (circle things, draw arrows, highlight, etc) and include comments on anything you draw. There is even an option to create a second document with all of your comments that makes a great checklist for the next revision. PDFs are also common enough that I can send these marked up documents to just about anybody and expect them to be able to see and read my comments.
Again, I don't think we'll get to the paperless office in my lifetime, but we could get a lot closer using the tools that are available.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
Yes it would seem to be obvious, but I keep running into people who have this "geek lifestyle" hang-up that means you have to be a slob to be a geek. The fact that I watch them spend 15 minutes looking for something on there desk annoys the living crap out of me.
;)
When I casuall remark about this I always get the "a messy desk is a sign of productivity" crap.
So to those people, my post could have been insight full. Although Informative, or +1 slobs please read may have been better
truth be told I consider my post a 2, but hey they won't even let me moderate for some reason.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A paperless office will never happen, but not because it wouldn't be possible, or even better. I think up little things all the time, that I start doing electroncically, instead of scribbled on this note or that napkin, or whatever. But I'm one of the guys that makes computers work, that understands them. In corporate america, I'm 1 in 100, or even 1000. The rest are still stuck in the 15th century, and if you don't believe me, duck into the helpdesk call center. The sad thing is, by the time computers are smart enough to do the thinking for these retards, they'll also be able to do the job for them.
But maybe I'm being too cynical. Maybe M$ makes it too hard for people, hell, if I had to run Word every time I wanted to scribble a note, I'd want to chop down a tree and felt some paper too. Would be easier. When I was a winslave, I remember numerous times, where I wanted a simple spreadsheet, just some columns with numbers, etc. And they only option was tabbing over in notepad(preferred) or opening Excel (to be avoided). Sc takes care of that stuff now.
Things I enjoy about paper:
+ It doesn't crash
+ It rarely loses data
+ 100% availability with proper care
+ Annotations are simple
+ Easy to take with you
+ Content doesn't change
+ Extremely quick access and intuitive interface
+ High resolution/easy on the eyes
Things I don't enjoy about paper:
+ Indexing/searching is tedious
+ Backups can be difficult
Right now, the list of pros/cons favors paper for me. PDAs are starting to reduce some of the cons (i.e. easy to take with you) but still suffer from most of the rest. About the only time a paper document becomes "unavailable" is when it gets lost. Can the same be said for your PC or PDA?
The crisp black-on-white is easy to read. Some LCD panels have text that is pretty easy to read at low resolutions (i.e. 1024x768 at around 100 pixels per inch) but can't touch the level of detail of even a cheap laser printed page of 300 dots (pixels) per inch. Professional typesetting often gets up to 2400 dots per inch. Not even close. This often doesn't matter for text, but what about that detailed network diagram that gets turned to mud at 100dpi. (Don't even get me started on people who use lossy compression on such images...)
Annotations are a given with paper-- just grab a pen and go to town. In the digital world, each and every software package needs to explicitly support annotations in order for this required ability to be present. So far as I know, no major PDF viewer allows one to take notes on it, so off to the printer it goes! (I realize that some PDF authoring software allows this kind of thing. The ones I have seen were masterpieces of overengineering and were correspondingly priced. What's wrong with a basic "notes in the margin" feature included at no cost?)
Until the massive inconveniences of using digital media are resolved, paper will continue to play a dominant role in exchanging and storing information.
Yes, but my manager seems to think that messiness equates to productivity, so I'm more than happy to leave my desk in a state of mess.
Now if only I could convince my girlfriend of the virtues of me having a messy house....
1) I can read it while standing in a train.
2) I scribble over it and keep these notes for later reference.
and most importantly,
3) I can take it with me to the loo where I can read it at leisure.
This underlying falacy was coined (by whom - that would be interesting to research..) by two different sorts of people trying to do two very different things:
1) one was a cost-analysis expert trying to rationalize an expensive investment in hardware and software
and..
2) at the other end of the spectrum, a polyanna futurist concocting a forecast of the brave new world we would soon be joining.
The biggest problem -- and here I'd probably blame the popular media -- is that our culture bought into the idea and it became it's own self-replicating meme.
The big problem is that the fundamental idea is a bunch of cr*p.
At some point, I'm very, very sorry, but at some point we need hard copy.
This will be true for some time, I would think, if not indefinitely...
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
Right. . . So did you get the memo about the new cover sheets?
The 'freedom' of handwritten scribble, anywhere on the sheet, as compared to restricted rigidity of type...
The 'freedom' of self-written hacks, anywhere on the machine/OS, as compared to the restricted rigidity of a system...
I know that I use paper for tons of things, and would much rather type for tons of others. OSS and 'boxed' apps have their places...
Where I work, it's all done on whiteboards. We've even considered buying one of those doohickeys that captures Whiteboard drawings. Paper is not so important, but it is 2nd place with laptops being a distant 3rd.
Where I work, in particular, we need a couple more ingredients in order to become close to paperless: Tablet PC's and roaming wireless capability. Tablet PC's are obvious, the stylus interface would lend itself much better than dragging a laptop to the meeting. Wireless roaming is a little harder to define, though. 802.11 will definitely do the job, but the biggest paper offenders also travel alot. If the tablet could wirelessly get on the internet from wherever the destination is, then I think I could convince some of the people here to adopt it instead of paper.
I'm starting to see wider use of PDA's (mostly Palm Pilots) being used for keeping contact info, but I'm not seeing a whole lot of note taking on them. A couple of us around here drag our laptop to meetings to take notes. This is why I think the tablet idea might work. Despite the simplicity of a laptop, undocking it and setting it up at the meeting seems like such a hassle compared to bringing a notepad.
"Derp de derp."
Contrast: monitor contrast is WAY lower than paper, it's harder on the eyes than a sheet of paper is
Glare: monitor glare makes things hard to see
Portability: until you have a 2-ounce monitor that you can hold in your hand while reclining in your chair, paper's got you beat.
I'm sure there's more. Personally, even beeing the computer-geek that I am, I MUST do the final editing of any document I produce with a paper printout. I don't know why, but it's just SO much easier.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Where have you heard that rainforests are cleared for paper production? Paper is usually made from pulp harvested from tree farms, which IIRC use Southern Pine and other dime-a-dozen species. Rainforests are usually cleared for cattle ranching, construction, and exotic hardwoods.
I've already seen several posters who rate electronic documents over paper documents because of the tree-saving factor; have they all forgotten that the pc uses electricity, which consumes all sorts of natural resources? I'm as much for saving the environment as the next guy is. Let's start by being factual: does anybody have a reliable comparison of Total Energy Cost of paper & electronic documents?
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
Maybe paper is good for collaboration, but not for archival. I don't collaborate at home, so I don't use paper.
... 449 files right now. And it all fits on one CD. Why do I even need a monthly paper statement? Just send it in email please and I'll save the file on disk.
I hate paper enough that I am almost done scanning years worth of pay stubs, credit card statements, statements, time sheets, repairs, orders, taxes,
I had this question asked to me in a job interview for an IS manager of a small city. I can only go by the look on the interviewer's faces, an obvious look to me of "that's not what we wanted to hear" and the following questions that my answer of "No, I believe computer only allow you to make more paper", that it's a good reason that the other finialist got the job. I still think I answered it correctly and have no regrets in doing so.
Besides everything you need to know or do is on a post-it anyway. You just can't find where you stuck it.
That really depends on where the people are.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
People can read text just fine at 12 pixels high. Nobody ever complains about the resolution of dot-matrix signs being too low.
Pictures taken at 640 by 480 look just fine. Sure, they could withstand getting closer to them at higher DPI, but it suffices just fine. The point I'm making is that DPI has little to nothign to do with why people still use paper. The main reason it's still used in the office environment is that there isn't a technological alternative that has all the same requirements. Laptops are harder to set up than taking a notepad into a meeting, and PocketPC's are too small.
I think Microsoft is doing the right thing by pursuing the Tablet PC market the way they are. They're trying to make the Tablet PC as good as paper. If you ever catch their marketing video on it, it portrays people drawing on their tablet with the stylus, highlighting/copying/pasting, etc. I think this is the first step. The second step would be to make it really light and connect wirelessly. The 3rd would be to make it dirt cheap. Get a few of these floating around your office and you'll see a dramatic reduction in paper usage.
"Derp de derp."
The messy desk is a signifier.
The productivity itself is what is signified.
Together, they make a sign.
Try wiping your butt with a PDA. You'll experience new-found admiration for PAPER!
Ad luna, Alicia! Ad luna!
...is the lack of interoperability between different programs on different systems. You don't need the latest version of MS Eyes 2002 to read a paper document. Despite all of the advances in user interfaces, computers are still hard to use.
Not to mention that everyone is always more trusting of paper copies. It is usually very easy to discover if a paper copy has been altered.
When you are able to talk to your computer in plain language, ie "Bring up the invoice from last month" you might be able to begin to eliminate paper. Don't get me wrong, computers are great for indexing and retreiving data. Getting the data into the computer is the hard part.
According to a FAQ at http://www.paper.upm-kymmene.com, "4) How much energy is needed in the paper production? Depending on the grade 2-4 MWh of heat and power is needed to produce one tonne of paper. The power use of an one hour home-PC session is roughly the same as the power used for a copy of a Donald Duck cartoon magazine. 5) How much water is needed in paper production? The fresh water use of a paper mill is about 10-15 cubic meters per tonne of paper depending on the grade and the mill."
["Marge, I agree with you - in theory. In theory, communism works. In theory." - Homer]
Who forgot to order more?
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
If I recall, one of the various user interface paradigms Apple was working on in the 80's-90's (circa Taligent and Pink) was an interface specifically called "Piles" based on some of this research.
While that never saw the light of day, the lessons learned from that research made their way into the Standard Macintosh bibles of user interface design. To wit:
This is, IMHO, one reason why the classic Mac OS interface was so amazing. You (the user) had complete freedom in organizing the documents on your computer however you wished. Spacially, color-based, or sorted. You could store your documents in whatever made sense to you, without the operating system declaring the Right Place for documents (ie, home directory, etc.. a la Windows and Unix).
Some people's Macs made sense only to their user, which is just how it should be - considering that it's a PC
Now with Apple moving to unix underpinnings which, thanks to the rigidness and inflexibility built into unix, don't allow for this type of "personal organization", it's difficult to find a system design that understands this.
This is the NUMBER ONE problem "old-school" Mac OS users have with Mac OS X - being told that they have to organize things in a certain way (ie, "in your home directory") and the thing that people coming to Mac OS X from a standard unix background don't (can't) understand.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
was in the throws of a paper reduction campaign, one of the poor MIS guys who sits beside me was tasked with determining which paper reports were no longer needed. He ran across a report that had been custom crafted for one of our CFO's 14 years ago. Even though this particular CFO retired 9 years ago, his report was still being printed. Here's the kicker, the report was an item by item sales summary for the company. No problem when we only stocked 8000 items in 50 stores. We've grown to 750 stores stocking 50,000 items, and the report had grown to +/-3000 pages. At least it was being recycled.....
*snicker*snicker* he doesn't know how to use the three shells. *snicker*
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
...there will never be a paperless office.
"Can I print it out?" is the most oft-heard phrase in IT. Satellite images of the Pacific Northwest slowly fade from green to brown as the laser and inkjets churn out page after page after page of documents that nobody reads.
The quote is and remains, "if it can't be described on a single 8.5x11 sheet of paper, it cannot be understood." I have an additional quote. "The only person who reads every page of a 50-page work of non-fiction is the person who wrote it."
But the more fundamental problem is this: the current group of GUIs for computers are terribly inefficient when trying to keep up with a time-limited multiple-task environment like air traffic control. Note that ATC displays are monochrome text and dots, not 50 fps, 3D-enhanced, voxel-textured, next-generation, quad-GPU multimedia extravaganzas.
Trying to get a lot of small items of information into multiple places with the current "desktop computers" is a task apparently best suited to an xterm. No mouse required, no navigating a little pointer all over the place, no looking for things, no browsing. Also, the GUI on Windows is a royal pain to use when trying to read from one application and type in another. Bah.
Just some rambling thoughts.
I would wager that those people you talk of are not very productive, even if they had an anally-retentive organize their desks.
;^)
I am one of those who have a "messy" desk. But it is only messy to the untrained eye. I *know* where things are. Some neurologists have theorized that those who have a "messy" bedroom or desk, but can remember pretty much where everything is, can do so because the "mess" is something we created.
In any case, people such as myself, tend to be non-lateral thinkers. It took years to convince my mother that my room wasn't messy. What finally worked was that she said something to the effect of "you can't find anything in there". I replied with "No, mom, YOU can't. I can find anything."
After twenty minutes of her asking for something and me demonstrating I knew exactly where it was, she finally gave in.
Still, a messy desk *is* a "sign" of productivity, but it is not a positive proof of it. After all, there have been "signs" of bigfoot and aliens, but you still have to look at other factors. Those people you run in to confuse "sign of" with "cause of". While we're being pedantic, productivity can not be a sign of productivity.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
"We of the OS community who disapprove of MS Word as the near-universal medium of exchange should come up with our own document format..."
.DOC format, then add into it the ideas of what you'd do to improve it, and then design a format to include all these ideas.
.DOC format is useful is that it does quite a bit of stuff. It supports all kinds of formatting, it encapsulates things like images, and it's openable on all MS platforms including PocketPC. I can send a .DOC file to just about anybody I know and they have SOME way of opening it, one way or another.
If you're going to attempt this, let me give you a piece of advice: Don't let what MS did wrong be your guide. Look at what they did right.
In a reply to Black Parrot's post, somebody started immediately with "don't support plugins so there'll be no bloat...". I appreciate the idea, but that's not the right way to start a new file format. What you need to do is make a list of what MS is doing right with the
The reason the
Once you have those features in place and you know how it should look, only then do you start looking at some of the lessons that MS has learned. Here's an interesting question: why is it bloated? What is MS doing? Are they encrypting it? Are they adding a bunch of bits to it that might be activated later? Did they write a function called 'BloatFile($Filename)'?
I think the main reason that Linux isn't gaining much ground as a desktop OS is because people are actively trying to fix problems that they think plague MS os's, but they're not looking at what MS did right! They quickly dismiss the idea that MS created software that people want and just assume that they make crap and stupid people buy it. Well, if you want to make Linux a better Operating System, then look at what MS did right. For example, out of the box, any Windows OS has TONS of drivers going back many years. Nearly all MS written apps have the same or nearly the same interface. Installation is a breeze. (Not having to create a swap partition is nice.) Doing something like 'change the color depth of my monitor' is as simple as clicking your mouse 3 or 4 times. If they'd develop Linux to be more like Windows in this respect, they'd get a lot farther in the desktop market than trying to fix only the flaws they percieve.
"Derp de derp."
Paper User Interfaces for Paper Documents
I've been working on a product for a few years that uses paper as a user interface , kind of a follow-on to the graphical user interface. I used to joke with friends that I was working on an 8.5x11 inch 400 dpi gray-scale display that costs 2.5 cents.
Document Tokens -- making paper a first class citizen on the network
You scan your documents, and they get stored in a document repository on the network (using WebDAV over HTTP or some other protocol), and it prints out a piece of paper that refers to the electronic document on the network, kind of a like a paper document or a paper URL. I named it a "Document Token". You drop it in your copier, for example, press the big green button, and it automatically recognizes it, retrieves the original, and prints it back. Or if you asked it to e-mail the scanned document instead, it will e-mail the document as an attachment or just a hyperlink.
Cover Sheets as Forms
Another thing you can do is print out a cover sheet with checkboxes on it and some document meta-data built in, so you can drop the cover sheet for your "Legal Contracts" on top of the latest contract you got, check the box for the account you're dealing with, and press the start button. It will scan, store based on the directions embedded in the paper, and associate the document meta-data with the paper.
Situated Meta-Data Capture
One of the most expensive things about scanning is associating the meta-data with the document after scanning. When you have the paper in hand, you know what the document is and where it came from. The file folder or desktop location is right there in front of you, and the physical presence of the document triggers certain kinds of memory as well. In ethnographic terms, the document is what Lucy Suchman calls situated When you try to add meta-data to a document after scanning, you (or worse, someone hired to look at it for you) is staring at a set of bits on a computer screen, completely divorced from its context, and it's expensive to discover where it came from and what it means. If you can associate this information with the paper document when it's in the paper domain, by marking it down on a paper user interface, then you save lots of time and money.
W3C Standardization
For the web to become a truly ubiquitous computing interface, it must move beyond the desktop. We're working with the W3C to standardize an XML representation of forms such that the same form purpose can be expressed in different media -- desktop, pda, mobile phone, and even paper. Take a look at the XForms last-call specification.
Product
The product is called FlowPort
Major barriers to adoption of the paperless office are electricity and ergonomics.
Reading info off a screen takes lots of electricity, even from a backlit LCD. What are some more efficient display technologies?
Reading info off a screen is uncomfortable. We need electronic user interfaces that are just as comfortable and intuitive as paper. What in development is striving for that goal?
On paperless offices, well, heck I was just discussing how well a client would work to view action forms by the helpdesk when another super said, they prefer them on paper. So be it. Paper it is.
Several years ago I was up to my eyeballs in a project of charting trends every which way to Sunday, 800 different charts and 12 copies of each. Gad. I worked with a buddy and we modified the in-house terminal program to show graphs. It blew them away. No more mountains of paper, right? Well, the first question they had was, "how can we print this?" It still reduced paper, but the irony was
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
No, my job is rather lowly, no decisions down where I am.
I don't call people stupid for their taste in operating systems. I've used almost all of them (I like quite a few of them), and there is only one I despise. Movies, the same. Religion... well, they're kinda dumb, but if its not scientology or the Jim Jones cult, I generally leave them alone. I'm not fat, I don't smell, and my wife appreciates the fact that I'm dateless. I'm tolerant of many things. Stupidity isn't one of them.
And if you didn't notice, I did not blame it all on the user. Who really could use M$ products? Hell, I'd want a paper and pencil too, if it were the only other choice.
But read the article, man. My god, the little snippet about the waitress in a diner (I think in comparison to air traffic controllers). That it's a non-serious example is all the better... technology can do a hell of alot better than that broken pencil she's always losing, or the notepad she writes on it with. The obvious improvement, would be a PDA with 802.11, and a mini-menu that she just has to use the stylus to punch in, rather than scribble in some illegible shorthand.
Think about it, before you attack me. How many 50 cent pads does she go through in a year? Enough to pay for the PDA? No? How about, that she still only has to enter it once, and yet they can have accurate inventory, or more accurate records? THat little diner may not know what it served on Sept 6th, 1983, but by god, every day forth, for the next 20 years, it could. Maybe they'll be able to predict all sorts of things, allowing them to only buy just enough stock, or know when to schedule vacations. All sorts of things that you can't know until you do it.
And then there is the enviromental angle. Do you think they recycle the used notes? Or do they get buried in a landfill? How many people do we employ in paper factories, that could be doing other more important things?
And then we have this schmuck, getting published, claiming paper has some magical property, that makes it perfect for human beings. I want to strangle him. If we arrange our papers so that it has some cool effect, then BY GOD WE CAN WRITE CODE THAT DOES THAT TOO. Companies that think they can buy off the shelf software, that's the problem. Hire some college weenies, and make it their job, to actually interact with the people that will be using the software. Sit them at a desk right next to them. Dock their salaries, every time they write code that isn't what people want or need. But me, I don't want to waste a large fraction of our economic output, producing a tool that is no longer necessary, and ruining the planet in the process.
I use a lot of email and i read a lot of online texts... i'm a tech geek at heart. I love new technologies, gadgets, and gizmos as much as anyone.
But there's a very good reason I'll never give up paper totally: Comfort.
It's like the person who eats out at gourmet restaurants all the time, but can't resist a grilled cheese sandwich with canned tomato soup. It's comfort food for the mind.
I love the smell of paper, the texture of it, and the way the printed word looks on it. Paper is a very tactile thing. It's there, you feel it. it's a part of your physical world. Words on a view screen will never compete with it, at least not for me.
As an added bonus, I can read a book for 8 hours straight and not want to dig my eyes out with a spoon.
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
60%-80% of all a company's information are stored in documents.
Paper documents have no automated way to enforce document retention standards (just ask Enron and Arthur Anderson)
Paper documents have no way to search the documents to enter the data in the "corporate memory". Infinitely valuable information is never cataloged and reviewed
The reason organizations don't manage this better is most document management syetems are very difficult and expensive to own.
This article takes a reactionary stance to try to promote (another useless) management philosphy and sell a book.
I want to write a book entitled "The Myth of the Management Book That's Not Full Of Crap".
But no one would read it.
I work at a place that has gone a long way towards the paperless office. The paperless office isn't about replacing the GOOD paper like reports and documents. It's about replacing the BAD paper like vacation forms, transfer forms, etc. All that stuff that gets lost, folded, spindled, and then your HMO benefits or direct deposit doesn't get done correctly.
A paperless office is a GOOD THING(tm) but more of a good thing isn't necessarily better.
-CZ
Now the truly modern approach would be a wall of ready entrees behind glass doors, where you insert coinage (or perhaps an electronic coinage) and retrieve your entree. Like a cafeteria, only better... less waiter-like intermediaries!
Or instead of a wall of compartments, the food can be on a conveyor belt -- popular in Sushi restaurants, no?
Of course, the more primitive Country Buffet has some powerful ideas as well -- self-service feeding! Sure, our grocer used to pick out our food for us too, and someone used to pump our gas, and someone still fetches our food... so inefficient.
A more exotic system might use a push-button, juke-box style menu at each table, and the entree is delivered via vacuum ducts beneath the floor! Or maybe we can pack the whole entree in a single pill! Reconstituted it would be just as good as the original, but in its original form provide an easy-to-pack dinner or lunch. More federal research dollars for this long-overdue idea, please!
Or wouldn't it be great to go to a restaurant where you picked your recipe and it was delivered in pretty little glass bowls all pre-measured and you cooked it yourself and the bowls were whisked away, just like on TV! Even better would be if, after placing the meal in the oven you could immediately remove it from another oven, using time-warping technology that apparently is prevalent in television studios across the world. I can be my own Julia Childs!
Retro schmetro... ambience is for luddites. This is the kind of innovation I want to invest in!
Right. . . So did you get the memo about the new cover sheets?
(snicker)
For one of my clients, I made a bogus TPS report and left it for them to discover. I've been told that when one of the middle-managment types found it, he 'bout pissed his pants with glee.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Southern pine is only a dime a dozen because crass, ignorant, self-serving rednecks are allowed to cut it all down without any regard to environmental impact. And if anyone questions or legislates, there's always a governemnt official with his palm out, ready to "take care" of the problem. In most of the South, there are few laws, and even fewer good 'ol boy officials willing to enforce them. If anyone doubts this, come have a look at the pile of 3 million-plus tires burning right now on the outskirts of Roanoke, after 30 years of illegal dumping.
If a paper map gets shot it still works.
If you get shot paper can be used (in a pinch) as a field dressing.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
It's also the number of monitors. It wont ever get completely paperless until the desk surface itself is made of 4 or 6 hi res touch screen monitors.
And they must be run by separate PC(s) so you can reboot, BSOD , whatever without losing the ability to use the information.
I'll think of a funny sig later on
So how is it that the average free software project integrates the work of hundreds of people from all around the globe who may never see each other? Mystery of mystery to the average Word user I'm sure.
Crappy propriatory software is the problem not the solution. Know what happens when you pass out 20 coppies of a "document" at my office? You get a ream of garbage, that's what. Just try sorting through all of it by hand. Why not set up a freaking web page and send a link to ask for comments? Wow, you might even recieve them in the mail and talk to the folks that sent them if you don't understand. If you can't incorporate them into your work, your work is not well organized. Where I work, people have to print everything out because the viewing programs are not well designed. Of course, it's hard to look at a large drawing with M$'s single virtual screen! Hell, it's hard to even organize your work into piles without virtual screens and desktops. Bleh, the "server" to share work? Give me a break, it's been set up into individual home directories with no read permisions that can't be changed, but that's to be expected for an OS that does not have user, group, world file permisions built into the file system and kernel. The rest of the "share" space is chronically disorganized so that all sorts of duplicate junk clutters and clogs it up. Can it be worse? Yes, add Outlook and Access to it. Oultook XP can't handle text anymore and most people are flinging around word docs that they then print and walk a further distance to the printer than to the sender's desk.
Fundamental design flaws made to protect an obsolete marketing model have led to all that, and it's given people a very false impression. My computers at home never crash, yet look at all the posts about how reliable paper is. Paper in my house is something the cat might eat. The computers, running debian and red hat are up 24/7. It's hard for people to imagine things beyond their crappy M$ desktop, and they are so oppressed by the thing at work they don't even want to look at one at home. Should we be supprised when people who look at the 10 lines of text they can read on a doc displayed by word go and print the thing out? Should we be supprised that people who feel like they have to print all of their mail consider email a pain? They think this because they have inadequate tools and don't know there is better stuff in the world.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I agree with this.
In UNIX there is a clear difference between applications and documents and this is a good thing. The user gets full control of where they put documents but the internal workings of where the applications are is hidden.
Installing software is much easier because you don't have to worry about where to install things; you just click the packages you want and they are installed automatically.
On the other hand, documents should be left entirely up to the user. I personally do not use the Evolution mail client because it messes up my
On a macintosh, I have a harder time because I need to know where files are stored on the harddrive to start them. I also get confused because there are many files that I don't know what they are or do.
The limit of girlfriend as age goes to thirty is wife or zero.
When her belly swells, some things get pushed to the side and never come back. No, not those things! I mean dishes, laundry, what not. When it happens you will understand Elvis and "Shake rattle and roll." "Get in the kitchen and make some noise with your pots and pans!" he says. Good luck.
Oh, on topic, people who don't have virtual screens and desktops on operating systems that don't crash and that can serve files with proper permisions, will never believe that an office can work without paper. So sad, too bad, what can you expect from the tiny mummies at the New Yorker? Is your first name Buster?
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
--Mike--
The issue of power consumption is silly. People are never going to stop using PCs regardless of how much paper they waste. The PC will sit on their desk burning up electricity even if it's only used to print duplicates of email and view porn. PCs will consume less energy in the future and reprocessed nuclear fuel is a renuable resource much like southern pine.
Finally, rain forests are not being cut for cattle farming and exotic hard wood. Most trees in Brazil are felled for slash and burn agriculture by "settelers", refugees from urban slums. The exotic hardwood is burnt with the rest because few countries will buy it. Cattle farming may move in after the land is exhausted (one year or so for the soil to errode to unusable clay.) but it's not a pimary cause.
The world is what you make it. We can use our resources wisely and make more for each other, of we can let vendors of shoddy wares waste our resources and efforts. Surely, M$ is the primary reason people print all of their junk at work, and the paperless office uses more paper than ever before.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
There is no way the paperless office will become a reality until those of us who have grown up with computers (i.e. under 30*) are the dominant force in business. The simple fact is that the vast majority people older than that aren't comfortable enough with computers to give up their precious paper.
My first tech job was a serious wakeup call for me in this respect. I was the youngest tech on the floor, and one of the 10 (out of maybe 40 techs) who didn't print out my email to read it. These were people who lived and breathed tech! My night shift counterpart and I (the only techs under 30) achieved a paperless bay and reaped the troubleshooting benefits of a searchable bay log. People were blown away by how much easier things were, but they couldn't seem to pry themselves away from the little used composition books that every other test bay used.
I could go on and on about my experiences there, but what it comes down to is that the age groups that are dominant in business today are firmly entrenched in paper, and the paperless office will never have a chance until they are replaced by people young enough to not understand the purpose of white-out.
*That's the cutoff point according to my experience. If you are over 30 and comfortable functioning without paper, I applaud you. Please don't be offended.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Paper seems to be gradually disappearing from my life. I think this book might be published just in time to be proven wrong. I taken note of paper consumption at various offices, and found the amount of paper consumed per person drops with age.
Pre-baby and baby boomers had learned to judge their productivity as the amount of paper consumed. The main reason for the massive increase in paper usage in the computer age was that, for a very long time, most people associated productivity with pounds of paper. It will take actual generational changes for the attitude to change.
The last engineering team I was on had produced only one half a filing cabinet of paper in a year, and never filled the recycle bucket.
Paper consumption is probably a bell curve. Computers greatly enhanced our ability to produce paper. As older generations die out and new generations take over, we will probably see a gradual drop in per capita paper consumption.
There is a very good chance that the 2001/2002 tech recession will be the cusp. The Wall Street Journal reported about a week ago that there has been a sharp drop in consumption in newsprint in the last year. Newspapers have had both a big drop in advertising and subscriptions. To cut costs, they have been finding ways to trim the size of the paper. Some are cutting the stock quote section...others have simply made the paper a quarter inch smaller.
The big jump in postage prices this year (to $.37) is likely to cut into first class mail. It might provide the incentive to finally switch to electronic billings.
This Slashdot article made a big deal about airlines. Again, I think it was the WSJ, reported this week about pilots finally getting laptops to replace their paperwork. The airline was citing major productivity increase that they hoped to acheive by finally going paperless.
It will take several generations before attitudes shift to the point where a paperless office or society is possible. Personally, I think there is a very good chance that we have hit the maximum paper/person consumption.
The pundits in The Myth of the Paperless Office had fun poking fun at the paperless office prophets of the past. But they may well have published at the top of the consumption curve, and have set themselves up for the next round of ridicule.
Insightful? How about a new moderation category: Bullshit.
No, I'm serious.
I had my doubts too, but my current manager was adament about it; that's how we do review and markup of documents (I'm a tech writer; there's a LOT of that).
Works perfectly. Click the little paragraph looking button, and everyone's changes are visible, in a different color. Hover the mouse over a change to see who made it. Right-click to accept or reject a change. Or use a Wizard thingie to search sequentially through the changes, accepting or rejecting each one. If it gets too messy to read with all those changes and strikeouts, just click the paragraph looking button again - changes hidden.
It's a heck of a lot more productive than trying to make out chicken scratches on paper. Every proposed change is legible, and you can see who made it and when. We use Word comments to explain changes.
My 2 cents.
If we arrange our papers so that it has some cool effect, then BY GOD WE CAN WRITE CODE THAT DOES THAT TOO
You can only write code that changes the display on a video monitor. If I have my paper-arranging set up to maximize the surface area of my desk, and my walls (via post-its) and the floor under my desk, and the top of my filing cabinet; the only way you are going to "write code that does that too" is to replace every flat surface in my office with a CRT.
And if you did that, then I wouldn't have any surface on which I can put a "bang cap" and whack it with my Swiss Army Knife when it is time to let off steam.
The virtual desktop is nice, and I'm staring at it for maybe 5 hours a day, but it doesn't replace the surface area and versatility of a real desktop, no matter how clever the software.
God is real unless declared integer
I'd mod you up if I had points, but alas. To further refine your point, I postulate that the cost-analysis expert understood the *productivity* gains associated with that expensive hardware and software, and was doing the right thing, but to get it past the bean counter, he had to sell it as reducing the cost of office supplies. Some things never change. :)
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
not really postmodern ... the theory was drawn up as a theory of language by the linguist ferdinand de saussure at the beginning of the 1900s. de saussure never published this although he did teach it and after his untimely death his students went back over their class notes and put a book together. guess this would not happen these days ... the theory was influential in a number of fields including with the anthropologist claude levi-strauss.
CRT's ? Try LCD's. Big ones.
Now the truly modern approach would be a wall of ready entrees behind glass doors, where you insert coinage (or perhaps an electronic coinage) and retrieve your entree. Like a cafeteria, only better... less waiter-like intermediaries!
You talking about an Automat. Common throughout cities in eastern US the middle the last century. The original disintermediation of food-service and the prototype for the helpless, ubiquitous fast-food joints of today.
illegitimii non ingravare
You're comparing a ton of paper (something like 50000 pages) to a one-hour PC session. Let's scale these down to be something similar. I can read about 50 pages/hour of moderately technical writing. 50000 pages/50 pph = 1000 hours to read all that paper. So that 2-4 MWh is really 2-4 KWh amortized over the reading time of the paper. Figure a 200 W power supply, and the paper is higher by only a factor of 10. AND that doesn't include the construction costs of the computer (you think paper uses a lot of water, you should try silicon computer chips).
-JS
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity...
[Please don't hit me.]
With tattoo you don't need,
Batteries
Network connection
Power plug
Monitor
Keyboard or mouse (pen though)
Tattoo is about the most reliable form of interoffice communication there is. You can take it with you anywhere, you can read it anytime you want. It's lightweight, and neatly folds up into a smaller space. If you need security, tattoo can be burned or shredded. If you get really bored, you can make airplanes out of tattoos.
You want games? Tattoo has some of the most ancient and popular games ever. Tic tac tatoo, connect the dots to name a few. Tattoo even has an intuitive interface for making your own games. In fact it's so easy a toddler can do it!
Tattoo in volume can be used to prop up a montior to eye level that doesn't have a stand. Have a table with a leg that's a little short? Easy enough, some folded tattooed person under the affected leg will make that table stand on all 4 legs like new again.
Girls love tattoos! Write a love letter, send a card, these will allways get you more brownie points with your signifigant other than electronic methods.
Tattoo has been used for thousands of years, without tattoo, we wouldn't have the great teaching of our forefathers. Our constitution was written on parchment, animal tattoo!
Have you hugged your tattoo today?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Unfortunatley Unix (not unix itself but the many applications) have put so much crap into the home directory that it is not user-friendly to present that as a desktop. So instead all the systems make a subdirectory called Desktop. From there it is a quick slide to crap like "My Documents" and "My Pictures".
I also think it is interesting that people who complain about the Unix (and Windows) putting types of files into directories (ie an installed app has to spread it's libraries, setup files, and executable into different directories) seem to not complain about this requirement that users segregate their own file types in this way.
When I was in college, I finally hit upon the proper way to write a paper. Not the all-too-common stream of consciousness in Word, but the tried and true method. I would first go to the library and use the electronic catalogue to find the general locations of books on my subject (say, 19th century German naval policy). Then I'd go to that section and browse the shelves looking for more books on the subject than my search had turned up. You see, the old and the new methods were complimentary.
I'd fill my briefcase with books, then head out to the local pub and get a table. I'd spread the books in great piles around me, pull out a sheet of paper and write--in longhand--a very general outline of what I wanted. Writing by hand forced me to think harder about what I was doing, as it is slower than typing. I'd then thumb through the books, noting on index cards what items were interesting (so that I could refer to them later). I'd then improve my outline and flesh it out, each time rewriting it longhand--making me familiar with it, revealing where it lacked &c.
Then I'd write the paper, by hand, from the outline. I'd read through it, and make any corrections which revealed themselves. Finally, I'd return to my flat and format the whole thing in LaTeX. This is where footnotes and the like would be inserted, using those notecards I mentioned earlier. I'd print out a draft, read through it once more, then print a final copy for my professor.
This manual process enabled me to consider the thrust and flow of my papers, of the arguments therein. It enabled me to do far better research than students who relied solely on the electronic index of books. It enabled the best grades of my college career. It also enabled me to enjoy many fine beers at the local pub, which was just fine by me:-)
The computer was no less essential. A paper formatted in LaTeX is a thing of beauty--and this cannot be over-emphasised when discussing the resulting grades. A paper written longhand is unatttractive.
The technologies are not mutually exclusive, but rather complimentary.
"Boss! Da plane, da plane!"
Sorry, had to!
:-p
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Well, I was actually referring to the articles in the Wall Street Journal that said Newspapers were dramatically cutting newsprint usage. The Myth of Paperless Office is using data from before the market correction. If I recall, they used paper consumption studies from 1999.
They reported the results of a boom cycle. We are now in a cost cutting cycle. Paper producers (IP) have reported slowing sales in a slowing economy.
Considering the major changes in the economy, it is likely that this book hit the market at the peak of the per capita paper consumption curve.
Yeah...back when I was a freshman in high school, I had a very similar discussion with my mom. I successfully proved to her that I knew where everything was...her response:
"Yeah, but you wouldn't want a girlfriend to see this, would you?"
Suffice it to say that my room was much cleaner the next day and remains so to this day.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"