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What Is Holding Back the Paperless Office?
Drethon writes "CNN has an article (are we up to the millionth article on this topic?) asking if the paperless office has arrived. This got me wondering, what are the main things holding back the paperless office? Just off the top of my head, the main thing keeping me printing out documents is the ability to spread a dozen pages of a document under review out on my table and marking it up by hand. PDF and Word markups are not too bad but they still lack the ability to spread many pages out to look over at the same time and could be improved to make markup a bit less restrictive. I do find myself printing out less with the use of dual monitors to have source documents and work under progress up at the same time, perhaps something like Microsoft's tabletop computer used as a desk will let me have at least a paperless desk. I know there are other reasons why offices are not becoming paperless. What are your reasons?"
Humans... We like to have a piece of paper in our hands, we can easily hand it to a coworker, we can scribble on it to take notes. I know it sounds oldskool, but for many tasks, a piece of paper is just superior. Sure, most of it is for temporary use, but paper isn't going anywhere. For many people reading from screen just isn't anywhere as comfortable as reading from paper. (That's why we still buy real books!)
People who bought the "paperless office" fad years ago were living in a dreamland.
Also, one thing to keep in mind. I have worked on large scale "scan documents from archives and the commit to big-ass proprietary content management systems". The conversion was extremely expensive, and the maintenance even more so. After all, you now needed expensive content manager Consultants, and competent DBAs (who have to be on call). For the paper version, you just needed one or two archivars. Just having tons and tons of paper sitting in a warehouse was was much cheaper, I heard later. These were Police documents, and they scanned in B&W... Photos were as such became unusable... I sure hope they'll keep the originals. I wonder who ever in his right mind approved that project.
You still have allot more freedom with a paper document. Our brains are just geared to use tools in the actual world rather than virtual objects. There's no real program that emulates all the freedoms you get form handling a physical tool. we are from the apes remember :P
~don't feel threatened by my pineal~
Technology:
I have yet to find anything that can replace the flexibility of a notepad..
Some stuff comes close (or even surpasses) in specific areas, but for general day to day stuff like taking notes at a meeting or scribbling out something to argue a point.. nah
People:
There are still people.. lots of them.. who will print out emails to read them. No technology will fix this.
Sometimes when working on some algorithmical or mathematical problem, I draw stuff on paper to visualize the problem better and find the solution. Drawing on a computer screen will never replace drawing with a pen on paper for that purpose for me.
> the main thing keeping me printing out documents is the ability to spread a dozen pages of a document under review out on my table and marking it up by hand.
So, in short, the paperless office is waiting on bigger displays. Sounds about right to me...
When Word or Acrobat allows me to draw 3D boxes and other geometric shapes in the margins of docs, then we'll talk.
I've never had my desk crash, losing all pieces of paper on it. Contrast that to Windows.
When push comes to shove, I can always get a paper form to the person that needs it. Contrast that to relying on an Exchange server.
When a form needs authorization, having the right person sign it with a pen always works. Contrast that to trying to get digital signatures to work.
If you work in health care, at a law office, in insurance, in a financial institution or virtually anything else heavily regulated by the government, you must keep paper copies of most of your stuff. You just can't have a paperless office in those situations.
I work in an office with 200+ cubes. We have all the latest office productivity tools. 99% of the employees have 10-30 yellow stickys stuck all over their desk for reminders. People seem somehow amazed and awestruck by my clean and streamlined desk that is clutter free and yellow sticky free. Sometimes people are even brave enough to ask "how do you do it? How do you work without... stickys??!!". I tell them about this technological miracle that was recently invented (years ago) called Outlook. Features include calendar with reminders and even... a task list! Amazed... my coworkers usually run back to their desk to place another yellow sticky on top of a recently expiring yellow sticky, that says "reminder, learn about outlook tool". I feel like I'm surrounded by spear-chuckers
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
Paper offers the chance to get up and walk around while reading or the chance to go to another part of the office to write.
Play Command HQ online
I work in an architecture/engineering office. Each department has its engineers/architects and its CAD technicians/designers. Our typical workflow has the engineer, ie me, quickly drawing out what I want on a blank plan, and the CAD guys make it happen so I can move on to other things. If I was going to draw what I wanted in the computer anyway, why do we need CAD guys? (hint: they are less expensive per hour, to be cynical. But that lets us get more work done overall).
I know there are other reasons why offices are not becoming paperless. What are your reasons?
I don't use paper at my home office. I have a printer for rare occasions, like when I want to print a backup set of driving directions for a long trip (the primary set being the GPS.) Some say they don't trust Windows (or any other OS, I guess) with their data. That's what backups are for. When was the last time you did a backup of all your papers, by the way? Papers are easy to lose and nearly impossible to find when you need them.
I have a scanner next to me, if I have a paper (like a manual on something I bought) I scan it and save. The paper manual may then be recycled. Less stuff to lay around and produce dust.
Even when I worked at a larger company (last year) the office was mostly paperless. All communication was done through email and IM and phone. I wasn't involved with code reviews, but meetings were done without papers - using a projector connected to presenter's notebook. The only paper I handled there was time cards, and that was only because of certain accounting regulations (it must be a physical document with a signature.)
I've had flatbed scanners for a long time, auto-feeding, etc. Way back, scanning was very manual and OCR took a Really Long Time. That was a turnoff for many years.
These days, there are really good scanners out there (we just picked up a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1400) and the OCR isn't too painful on a modern box. The ScanSnap is color and double-sided with a large ADF - and blazing fast. I cannot picture too many improvements, except maybe a scanner that would unfold paper and remove staples... but the sticking point is still document management and access.
We're part of the way there. The largest remaining problems are software and people.
The upside? A banker's box of papers can be consolidated onto a quarter of a DVD - all searchable. I want that. :-)
primarily because a paper-based process is tremendously wasteful, expensive, and it cannot take advantage of many efficiencies of keeping documents in the digital domain. For our Boston office alone, we spend tens of thousands of dollars each year on paper, ink, and printer/photocopier maintenance.
What it mostly comes down to for us is screen real-estate; the ability to work from multiple documents at once is essential. We are piloting some very large monitors now (24"+), and the things we're discovering were somewhat unexpected from the IT staff's perspective. Most people, but especially older workers, intensely dislike the large screens.
Their complaints are along the lines of "it's too big" and "sensory overload". It seems that, with their previous displays, which were 15" LCDs, people could tuck their monitor away, and use the computer to augment their work. People universally liked moving from 15" CRTs to 15" LCDs because it made the computer even less obtrusive. However, a shift to a digital workflow is really quite a change, and the large screen reinforces that. It immediately confronts people with the fact that they really have to work on the computer now. Younger employees seem very eager to do this, but older employees, some of whom have worked with a paper process for 20+ years, really do not like this idea at all, and have even recently made childish proclamations like "I reserve the right to print something anytime I want!"
My sense is that this attitude will eventually pass, but it may be a generational thing. As younger employees move into more senior positions, we'll probably see paper go away. Obviously, I'm generalizing here, because some older employees, especially our graphic designers, LOVE the big screens. Their process has been entirely computer based for a long time already. Given that most of the actual work is done by younger employees, we may find ourselves giving the less senior people big screens, and let the more senior people keep what they have. They spend most of their time in meetings anyhow.
"A paperless office is as useful as a paperless toilet. Some things would be impractical..."
OK, it's not that old a saying, but it's valid in a number of ways.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Back in the 80s, I remember someone saying that a paperless office would be about as useful as the paperless toilet.
I'm not sure why I feel that this is true. But I'm hoping this discussion will provide insight.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
A whole desk computer is what you need, with easy ways of sending someone a document.
Imagine if you had a meeting room and the whole desk was a computer, but you could effectively bring your own computer display over to the desk? No need to bring your laptop, no need to bring a notepad with you.
Ok, we will need to move away from WIMP to make this possible perhaps?
What's holding down the paperless Office? The answer is mainly: you. I've been working at my IT job for a few years. Almost if not all of my communication is by mail, phone or coffee machine. I normally do not read anything offline, and if I write anything down it's because I do the exercise to remember. Only top priority notes are kept, and they are directly typed into a document on the server.
I've recently had to host a meeting with 20 persons and I just used a laptop and a projector, The persons hosting the meeting before gave everybody a lot of paper (which 90 percent won't even read because they are not directly involved). I just gave them one double sided page so they could scribble some notes next to the items on the agenda.
I absolutely hate paper when I'm at work. Office documents need versions, need to be able to be pushed around, deleted and changed. You must be able to search through them quickly. Novels are much better in a book, but at work, I'll would prefer digital versions every time (even though paper even there certainly has its advantages).
Of course I do have double screens at work, something every IT person should have - if only to minimize costs.
Some of the reasons I still use paper:
There are some things that paper has that digital copies can never replace.
Many people feel that some pieces of sensitive information are safer on a piece of paper in a locked desk than they are on a drive on your network.
The feel of assurance one gets from a physical, actual, handwritten signature (sad to say but even a generic 'rubber stamped' signature has a better "feel" to it than receiving a generic pdf form regardless of what new digital cert/signature accompanies the pdf.)
If you graduated from a nice college, how would you feel if they just emailed you a PDF of your diploma? It wouldn't 'feel' the same printing it out and hanging it on the wall, for whatever reason. (I'd say it goes deeper than that, though. 1s and 0s aren't directly tangible in and of themselves. Since they are so easy to reproduce copies of them, there really isn't the same type of sentimental value. If you 'lost' a PDF book your girlfriend gave you, for example, you could redownload the exact same copy of the file over again-- and you would experience no sense of loss... However, if your girlfriend bought you a physical copy of the book, and you lost it, even if you went to the store and repurchased an exact same copy of the same printing of the same book-- it wouldn't be the same 'book'. There is something empty about the 1's and 0's, and, though I love the possibilities that technology makes available to us, I hope that never changes.)
Physical placement of actual papers registers in the mind. If you have a collage of papers above your desk with various phone numbers, IPs, or whatever, your mind usually connects with that easier than 'what file/folder is that in?', and it's easier to look up than it is to click through multiple folders. (It's less steps to look up, than it is to sift through).
I think that paper and digital copies compliment eachother. They each have certain advantages over the other, but they can never fully replace one another.
Paper is incredibly cheap...
At ~1 cent per page, how many reams of paper would it take to pay off a single tablet/eBook reader for a single person?
Answer: "Too many"
Tablets, so far, have been far too geared for the high end... Luxury devices. Meanwhile, the essentially free "Personal Organizers" that were flying off the shelves close to 10 years ago now, had everything needed, just in too small dimensions...
In short, once someone sells a 7" display, with decent pen-input, basic wireless, and a stupid-simple UI, for perhaps $25, then you'll see the last stronghold of paper fall away.
Until then, it will continue to be a trade-off... Is e-mailing this report okay, or will it need to be referenced in the next meeting, or by someone as they're walking around? Often, it's cost more to take the time to figure that out, than the cost of continuing to print it...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I mean, so as to be completely unusable. I have books that are torn, missing spines, water damaged, defaced, and they still work. With no other hardware. Even during a power cut, or on the beach, and without any kind of hardware, and no language problems even after centuries. Paper is just superior technology.
Maybe the paperless office has not arrived yet but at least in my domain (software engineering), there has been a huge change in the last 3-5 years : most of the documents are exchanged with customers/partners in electronic form and the reference version is somewhere on server (most of the times on a simple file server, sometimes in a document management system). Only a few documents remain in paper form (contracts, orders, etc...), but they are quickly scanned so that we only use the electronic version in day-to-day use (while the paper version is archived).
Yes, there is still a lot of paper around, but it is mostly used for personal usage, and can simply be thrown away once a project is over.
1) A crisp blank sheet of paper is the greatest design tool ever invented.
2) Most computer applications don't support the many-to-many relationships with the same ease physical mediums do.
IME, word processors (such as Word) are the main impediment to the paperless office. The general problems are: they're based on the 8.5 x 11" paper paradigm, they contain unstructured data, and they're too difficult to share, search, and otherwise organize electronically. I use MS-Word at work, so my examples/complaints will be specific to Word. The issues I have with Word in how it impedes a paperless office are:
IMO, the paperless office isn't going to happen until Someone(tm) manages to replace the word processor with a database that looks and acts like a word processor. Kind of like how everyone can use a fax machine (which acts like a telephone and copier) but those same folks balk at using a computer scanner and email over tcp/ip even though the fax machine is simply a low quality scanner that uses an inflexible, low speed modem instead of a tcp/ip network connection.
I am a math teacher and use a tablet wirelessly connected to a projector to teach using OneNote. It has all the advantages of a chalkboard or pen and paper plus:
I always have all of my notes. Always.
My notes are in color. I have a large selection of colors and sizes. (and my highlighters dont get messed up or run out)
If I didnt leave myself enough room, I can make more room.
If I want to take an idea in another direction, I can copy what I have to another page and fork off in the direction I want.
Using OneNote, I can search through my handwritten notes as if they were text. Very useful for quickly finding old notes that are buried amidst lots of notes.
I can resize diagrams.
I can print pages to OneNote and use OCR to get the text from it or write all over it.
I can quickly copy any part of my screen to it.
I can publish my notes as PDF's or print copies.
I have not found one draw back. In fact, I would like you to try to think of one (perhaps I have over looked it).
Make sure you turn on pressure sensitive ink (obviously buy a tablet that is pressure sensitive) and select an ink thick enough so you can see the changes in width with the changes in pressure. This makes it look just like a hand written diagram.
The only word of caution to teachers is if you are copying and pasting something - give your students time to recopy it in their notes.
Also, get a tablet that is convertible. Then it is your laptop when you are doing regular stuff and yet when you need to draw a diagram - you can!
The real motto for tablet computers needs to be "Use but not over use" (just like the motion stuff for wii)
Dont write a paper in tablet mode - type it, it's faster. etc.
I am a mathematician who, like yourself, "thinks on paper". The tablet is the computer you need.
Get one with a dual digitizer. Active and passive. Get a convertible. Get OneNote. Resist the urge to do everything in tablet mode. I would bet most people with your sensibilities would not be disappointed. I know I am not.
Plus, I've heard there are OneNote like apps which also do math stuff, like evaluate determinants for you, draw graphs, take derivatives etc.. I have not looked into those yet.
I have used this set up for four years.
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
Recently I had an opportunity to write two research papers, and to be different I did it without printing out anything but the final drafts. All in all it was a successful experience. Here is how I did it.
First off, I used a Mac. This is important, because (a) OS X support for the PDF format is far superior to the support on Windows; and (b) because the Spaces virtual desktop and Expose window viewing make dealing with thirty open windows at once practical.
My research paper was a moderately short (4000 words), but had about twenty five source papers from various scientific journals. I downloaded the source papers in pdf form and gave them names similar to their citation name (e.g. Smith et al (2002)). I then opened the papers and distributed them around nine virtual desktops. Each virtual desktop represented a different type of paper, a different topic or a different side to the argument at hand. I then read each paper on screen and highlighted key passages (the Preview function on OS X has this feature built in, along with annotated notes). I also added notes to important passages, noting how I might use the particular passage in my essay. Again, on a Mac, annotating pdf's is very easy.
Once I finished reading and annotating, I began to write. I would drag the essay window around the desktops so I could view my essay alongside pertinent scientific papers. If I remembered a passage, but couldn't remember which paper it was in, I could just search the computer, as all pdf files are indexed word for word. Also, I was able to copy and paste full scalable vector graphics from the pdf files. If I saw a graph I wished to use, I just copied it and placed it in my document. In the final output, the graph was an exact copy, not an anti-aliased pixelated screenshot. I actually used LaTeX for this, and created new pdf versions of the graphs which I added to the source code.
The end result of this was a very nice looking final paper, with beautiful graphs and typography. I believe that not printing out the source papers was actually more efficient because it was so easy to navigate between them, and because I could search them. I have written many other papers in the past, and had previously always printed the journals out. The result was usually a sprawling and chaotic mess, where papers disappeared and where it was difficult to keep straight what was said in different papers. Using the Mac's amazing window and desktop management system made this not only possible, but advantageous. I didn't print out anything but the final version. Proof-reading the pdf files was good enough for me.
As to the topic at hand, I think one of the key factors that has prevented the paperless office is poor user interface design. With the right user interface, ditching paper becomes a possibility.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
If you think that's what a bidet is designed for, then you are horribly abusing your bidet
Well it's not a drinking fountain... ... I mean... is it?
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."