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?"

Comments

Basically?

[Corporate Troll]

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.

Re:Basically?

[painandgreed]

People who bought the "paperless office" fad years ago were living in a dreamland.

Let me tell you, it's nice to work in a dreamland. I work in Radiology Healthcare and despite people telling us that we couldn't go filmless, we did it, so we have ignored the people that are telling us we can't go paperless and doing well. Our reqs get faxed to our fax server. The schedulers bring them up on their computer and schedule the exams from the digital req which is now associated with that exam. From there it goes directly to the queue of a doctor, sometimes in another building, to protocol. Once protocoled, it goes to the radtech's queue to have the exam preformed. This all regularly happens in a time quicker that it would have taken the scheduler to walk over to the fax machine and get the paper requisition to begin with. The req doesn't get lost and is available to anybody at anytime in the process with the click of a button.

Radiology has some pretty nice systems built to do all this, and we had to give a good number of people dual monitors (but monitors are cheap and even the cheapo computers we buy are ready for dual monitor support these days). However, the number of printers we have is half what it was several years ago and they break down less often because they get used less. That's less support I have to do. We also got rid of sticker printers. Those were even worse. We still have to print for this or that but our main workflow is paperless. I suspect that the main reasons that offices can't go paperless is inertia of the people who don't want to, poor workflow, and insufficent tools to do so rather than any actual cost or usefullness of paper.

Drawing

[Lord Lode]

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.

Re:Drawing

[raddan]

I made the switch to whiteboard, which I keep on the wall next to my desk. I find that it is better than paper, because paper is almost always too small, and it lets me discuss ideas with other employees a bit easier.

I tried "virtual whiteboard" with pen input recently at my CS department, and I found it very difficult to use, partly because the pen input device I was looking at was not the same thing I was drawing on.

Doodles

[hivebrain]

When Word or Acrobat allows me to draw 3D boxes and other geometric shapes in the margins of docs, then we'll talk.

A: The law.

[hal2814]

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.

Resistance Of Change

[thechemic]

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

Re:Resistance Of Change

[$RANDOMLUSER]

...this technological miracle that was recently invented (years ago) called Outlook.

You had me up until that bit.

Old saying

[AliasMarlowe]

"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.

Re:Old saying

[clickety6]

"A paperless office is as useful as a paperless toilet.

But they both mean everything has to be done digitally... ;-)

Re:Old saying

[CRCulver]

In my travel experience, Third World countries that maintain the taboo of eating with the left hand do so because they have mastered the art of wiping their asses, but not washing their hands. At most they would just quickly run water over the hand, but the idea of using soup and scrubbing their hands good just doesn't seem to occur to the masses.

Re:Old saying

[pjt33]

What kind of soup do you find works best?

Re:Old saying

[Zen Hash]

Why not? I built my office around my toilet. That way when I sit down to work, I don't have to stop for anything. Less distractions too, since people rarely come into my office anymore unless they have a good reason.

Re:In short

[Hylandr]

Quote: There are still people.. lots of them.. who will print out emails to read them. No technology will fix this.

Agreed. My place of work takes orders from the website, prints them and plops them into their ERP system. I have been brought in to fix this but there are active parties fighting me tooth and claw.

For too many reasons to list. Needing a "Human Glue" means job security.

- Dan.