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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.
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?
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.
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.....
...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.
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
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
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
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!
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.
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.