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Campaign To Remove Paper From Offices
An anonymous reader writes "A campaign started by HelloFax, Google, Expensify, and others has challenged businesses to get rid of physical paper from their office environment in 2013. According to the EPA, the average office worker uses about 10,000 sheets of paper each year, and the Paperless 2013 project wants to move all of those documents online. HelloFax CEO Joseph Walla said, 'The digital tools that are available today blow what we had even five years ago out of the water. For the first time, it's easy to sign, fax, and store documents without ever printing a piece of paper. It's finally fast and simple to complete paperwork and expense reports, to manage accounting, pay bills and invoice others. The paperless office is here – we just need to use it.' The companies involved all have a pretty obvious dog in this fight, but I can't say I'd mind getting rid of the stacks of paper HR sends me."
If it's anything like my old office, it's filled with a mixture of people unwilling or unable to learn ANYTHING new. ANYTHING new, no matter how simple.
They learned how to fax stuff when they started in 1987, and that is the way they will do it until they die. And if you try to make them change, they will feign near-catatonic levels of stupidity, throw fits, intentionally sabotage equipment (yep, actually seen it happen), and generally throw up any roadblock they can manage to stand in the way of learning even the simplest new task.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I've always said the only way to go paperless is to not have printers in the office. None. You need to take away the ability to print and only then will people adapt.
Our office went paperless. I have the memo thumbtacked to the wall. You may not see it because of the stack of TPS reports though.
... bullshit. 10,000 pages a year? Even if you count every page of every book and all the toilet paper I wipe my arse with it would be a fraction of that.
I'm all for saving paper, but this kind of exaggeration isn't very helpful. It's like the old one about plastic bags having an average lifetime of less than three minutes, which seems to ignore the fact that most people use them as bin liners.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Patent trolls want $1,000â"for using scanners
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/patent-trolls-want-1000-for-using-scanners/
If you voted for Nader, THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!!
H.R. used to prepare a pamplet of about 50 pages going over our yearly elections for things like health, saving, etc. For this year, they produced a CD-Rom containing all the information in PDF format. Also, all the "paperwork" was done via a Web site. The only piece of paper was one sheet which we had to sign indicating that we had one everything we wanted to with our elections.
That number sounded pretty high to me, but then I remembered I work in IT.
I'm not accepting customer purchase orders, receiving order acknowledgments or sending/receiving invoices, you know - the kind of stuff most office workers do every minute of every day.
From that perspective - and also from looking around at different desks in the office - I would say 30 pages per day is a pretty conservative estimate.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
These guys can help:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/01/02/2032212/patent-troll-targeting-users-of-scanners-wants-1000employee
Will businesses think the startup cost of roughly $1000 per employee is worth it?
They might want to rethink using the name Project Paperless, or variants thereof. Trolls could sue them,. . . ;-)
What is cheaper for a company of 500 people? :
1) A foolproof RAID + backup system, + expenditure in dealing with replacements, loss and transfer of backups
2) stacks of paper
3) paying some company to do 1, with decent connection to access said content.
3.1) with mini on-site version for currently active work (including the current months data, or week, whatever) in the event the network / service fails.
With the exception of one recent and unusual project, I typically print out at most a few sheets of paper per year for work and this has been true for years, with the added bonus of never having to understand how my clients' printers "work".
I'm still working through (ie recycling) a sheaf of old printouts from yesteryear for my small hand-written to-do lists. Even including that I can't imagine that I use even (say) 100 sheets of A4 per year.
Doesn't stop other people printing stuff out and giving it to me unsolicited, eg meeting minutes and agendas, but I push for less of that, and instant recycling afterwards.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
You remember when they told us about the "paperless office" the last time round?
They lied!
That average probably includes people who work in offices where they print hundreds or even thousands of invoices per day.
Palm trees and 8
Add 2013 to list of deadlines missed.
I'm a software engineer, so naturally I do everything via computer. The exception is when I'm working out a problem and I need to scratch up some psuedocode or diagrams quickly. There's no way electronics could be an adequate substitute for working through problems on paper. Figuring out a problem on paper is both faster and less frustrating. It's the same reason why chalkboards/whiteboards exist.
In theory I'd agree, but in practice so far these have been replaced, in my experience, with things that are even worse than receiving stacks of paper:
1. Far too many emails.
2. Online systems that are damn near impossible to use. As an example, the former system we used for hiring was that I got a stack of resumes with cover letters, on paper, in my internal mailbox. The paperless system we have moved to, "HR Manager", through some combination of its design and/or our HR department's configuration of it, results in me needing to click through about 6 menus and select a bunch of options just to see the list of people who applied for a position. And then more if I want to actually download PDFs of their resumes and cover letters.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It's just a scam to get people to scan documents and email them so they can get sued...
Would it be a bit more appropriate to get rid of junkmail and phonebooks first?
Some offices REQUIRE hard copies of things. Junkmail and phonebooks have short-lived usefulness (if at all) and waste tremendous amounts of other resources (like the postman driving around to very postbox and delivering it.)
Good luck with that. I bet you could get close to a paperless office, but with the need for a legal department and/or HR, it isn't going to _completely_ happen at any office. People still use fax machines :(
One big argument I've heard against these systems is that the records tend to live forever, though backups, etc. If your company is subpoenaed, you may have to produce documents that you thought were destroyed long ago and no longer have any business use, yet might harm your case. At the very least, you may face some liability if confidential/protected documents leak out, like old payroll records that will inevitably have everyone's social security numbers.
It'll never happen. Not in the next 20 years, at least.
One particular problem I see is viewing multiple documents in a workspace simultaneously (e.g. a mosiac of paperwork on one's desk) without requiring an iPad per document or a smartboard built into the top of your desk.
And, besides that, I find writing, with a pen, to be much more enjoyable than typing.
And much more productive while recording brainstorming sessions.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
I have been doing document management systems for 15 years and we were implementing paperless signing even in 1997. There's nothing new today that wasn't around and underused.
There's a significant cost per document type to create electronic versions and integrate it into a proper workflow. This doesn't have a ROI on low volume types.
YES! YES! YES! says the government. Then they can pass laws requiring the cloud to give them access to everything your company does.
I'm running into a problem -- Company "A" is good, they use standard 8 1/2 x 11. Company "B" uses something else, and won't scan (or loot right if I do need to print it out). Company "C" will send my information, on pdf, with the email encrypted. Company "D" will encrypt the PDF, with the last 4 of my SS#. Company "E" will send me an email invoice, company "F" will attached a PDF, company "G" expected me to print the invoice/information out from a web page (No, I don't have Adobe Acrobat).
Can we all just standardize and get along?
It is *NOT* trivially easy to receive sign and fax documents paperlessly.
To do that every employee would at least need a *decent* graphics tablet. And no, for things where a signature is needed, you need a real signature. "digital" signatures don't cut it.
They'd also need much better monitors than they have now, most of the reason I print hardcopy is that some of the information dense PDF's I have to deal with just don't display well on the crappy (landscape only) monitors we have.
Big $$$ to fix those issues.
Is just stupid
So, I pseudocode on paper, and probably go through a page of paper every week or two. But 10,000 pages per person? Given 52 weeks in a year, and assuming an employee takes three weeks off (52 -3 = 49), and five working days in a week, that equates to about ~41 pages per day per person. Ouch.
The idea of a fully "paperless" office is quite dumb. Now, a less paper office? Totally reasonable.
Most of the things listen in the summary I'd love to see, but it fails to address the one thing I actually use paper for, quick notes.
Both to myself another day and to missing coworkers.
Now, before you say it "well why not use email?"
Because these days email is so cluttered but desks are so clean, it's easier to notice a paper on your desk over an email in your already clogged inbox.
...the average office worker uses about 10,000 sheets of paper each year, ...
Seriously? I used less than 500 sheets (one ream) for both home and office last year - seriously. Now, my wife (of 20 years) was a teacher and routinely used much more - which we bought ourselves because her school only allocated one 500-sheet ream to each teacher, for the entire school year (I digress) - but she still used less than 10,000 sheets/year. She died on Jan 13, 2006 (of a brain tumor, just seven weeks after diagnosis) and I still have a 1/2 full box of paper at home. Sigh.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
paper is easy to recycle and made from renewable resources. Screen based media use lots of nasty chemicals and generally break or go out of style within 5 years.
We have books and paintings that are hundreds of years old. Your Palm Pilot is sitting in a drawer somewhere with a broken battery and no drivers for your current system.
I can grab a piece of paper, write a quick note with a goofy drawing and a taped on newspaper article and shove it in the fax sheet feeder and then hit 1 on the predial. My buddy has it in 30 seconds and can tack it on the wall. If I tried to do that with software it would take about 3 hours of hair tearing with a scanner, drawing tablet and 3 or 4 different software applications and then it would probably get kicked back by my mail provider for being too big while looking like crap.
Paper is really good for some things and the "paperless office" is just some silly obsession with trying to replace a technology that is old and almost unbeatable in its flexibility for certain tasks.
Won't someone think of Dunder Mifflin?!?
If we go to a paperless office, how will Dwight keep his beet farm?!
It's too bad that the information in your old office will long outlive the other information lost in the Digital Dark Age.
I have seen restaurants that send receipts via email, and have an entirely paperless payment system -- and as an added bonus, the Android device that is being used in lieu of paper will divide your bill in whatever arbitrary way you want. There are a lot more computers today than there were 50 years ago, and a much more robust communications infrastructure for those computers.
It will be a while before paperless business is common, but eventually it is going to happen. Printing things costs money, and a lot of businesses have computers that are underutilized (like cash registers); eventually, saving money will begin to outweigh the resistance to change.
Palm trees and 8
expense reports may still have to deal with paper receipts, 3rd party's that may want a fax or there own format.
I look at the paper I recycle, and realize that generally I printed it for insurance, just in case a hard drive goes down or a document is deleted or changed. Usually it was necessary, almost always unnecessary. Just like tornado, flood, or hurricane insurance. Should I do without insurance? I'd save some money.
Gently reply
Important documents should be on paper---for archiving---not faxing.
Too bad nobody wants to get rid of the most worthless use of paper: junkmail and phonebooks.
Of course, the US Government will fight tooth and nail to keep junkmail as a revenue stream for the US Post Office.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/business/seeking-revenue-postal-service-plans-to-deliver-more-junk-mail.html?_r=0
Sure, printing is now so cheap and easy that we tend to do more of it. But perhaps we haven't seen the 'paperless office' because access to information has also become so easy and inexpensive. You can download and print a 100 page PDF in a few seconds, which makes it easy for anyone to become their own printing press. Find an interesting article online? Just click "Print" and you have a hard copy.
As some there big issues are under / over sized fields.
The MFP in the office has booklet mode, which shrinks A4 sheets to 4 to a side, prints them in the right order, folds it and adds 2 staples. I'm in as long as I can keep this feature which is perfect for manuals, long dull reports and even source you want to study on the toilet. It's the mindless printing of email, finance batch import summaries for 'auditing purposes' and non-duplex wastage that needs to be addressed.
So a non-profit behind which all these bozo companies that want to hold your data hostage are located wants to deprive you of a way to keep your data locally... Great...
First of all motherfuckers, paper is the most reusable resource we have... well maybe second behind water. We have all but perfected tree farms. And we recycle hell of a lot more of paper than we do of iPads, computers, and any other garbage, with a lot less environmental damage.
Second, there are already forces making sure that no more paper than necessary gets used, it's called fuckin' economics. That paper is cheap, but it ain't free. Companies already try to do things like make their employees print double sided when possible. In most cases, using a paper copy is still the way to go. I used all digital books this semester at university and I'll tell you many times I wish I had the real thing. Sure I didn't miss the weight of logging around 5 bricks, but I'd love to have the real thing on hand when studying sometime.
Final note, 10k pages is very little. Back when I was an office drone, I would easily use 100k a year.
We're still missing Kindle-like screens that can display text without beaming your eyes with light.
...it's not as if Google, HelloFax, and Expensify stand to gain from a paperless office or anything like that. Oh look, there's this little thing called sustainable forestry that ensures a renewable resource like trees is managed properly to (gasp!) provide paper to the masses and a natural resource for visitors.
Technology-oriented companies who profit from paperless business exaggerate statistics in order to guilt businesses into no longer using paper!
In other news, water is wet and China is full of Chinese people. Film at 11.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I would settle for completely paperless processes involving external actors such as clients or customers.
Its my observation that a lot of the organizations that require me to print something hold massive monopoly such as a loan company or service company. On a recent student loan consolidation app I had to wait 2 weeks for a paper application to be mailed to me only to find out later that the paper app was then scanned in to a computer...the entire process lasted 6-8 weeks thanks to snail mail and the result was an electronic application.
My skill in importing signatures in to PDFs that I handily draw in MS Paint is pretty good too...such a crying shame.
10,000 sheets is not as much as you might think. It is less than 1 ream of paper every two weeks. How many boxes of paper are their in your offices supply room? All that takes is just being a careless printer, and, as others have stated, a worker who prints and sends invoices for a medium size company could get through their 25 reams in a couple of weeks.
I work for the government and print thousands of pages a month.
I am not reading all that (and yes, I have to read it all) on low-DPI crap monitors that are issued to me, and nobody in my department has any power to change right on up.
Until I have a 30" high DPI display at work - like I have at home - my eyes will be reading off the printed page.
..don't panic
1. Something to replace the paper notebooks I use to keep extemporaneous notes in. It needs to be relatively free-form, as quick to input as a scribble with a pen, and need not be indexed, merely stored. It does need to allow me to flip through pages quickly, showing me the whole page in a flash and letting me swipe through. Indexing and conversions are Phase Two.
2. Something to let me view multiple pages of a document simultaneously, alongside one another. Easily repositioned.
Before we go further, what I want will require multiple monitors and a tablet. The monitors will not kill trees, but their overall eco cost will be at least as much as paper, I suspect.
Also, that notebook replacdement will probably be a tablet. It needs to be secure, within the corporate environment, and also afford full security when detached om the network. In fact, it needs to be autonomous. My current solution, paper notebooks, are a physical security issue. Since this new gizmo will have to be with me, biometrics are the security solution, and needs to give me access as fast as flipping a page. Ok, 2 seconds.
Also, I work for a financial institution. Security is a little higher than important, but not as high as military.
What I want is Surface as a desktop, along with a traditional monitor-based workspace. Just make my desk a big Surface device, add in the 'Minority Report' UI, and I can ditch paper for good, though I doubt I kill more than 3,000 pages a year. Assuming I can write on my new Surface surface, drop things, and spill coffee on the edges, all is good.
Maybe 2015. Maybe no. Sharp or Samsung or whoever is making the flecible displays are close to somethign that would work cleverly, but I am constrained by patent applications from going further. Suffice to say there are a LOT LOT LOT more patents to be filed.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I'm part of a large organization that is attempting to go paperless at my workplace. It sucks. Whenever the LAN goes down, you have to print off stuff to continue working. If you want to take your work anywhere other than where the location of the dock for tablets or that Ethernet jacks for the laptops, you either have to load everything you need before disconnecting, or print it out. When you're operating on limited power consumption, you have to use printed stuff. A lot of the stuff that's supposed to be on the LAN doesn't work right and/or reliably some of the time, so you always end up printing that stuff out because you can't trust that it will load/save/respond correctly. Getting electronic signatures is such a pain that you just print stuff off and have people sign it, then get it transcribed later. It might work if every single person had their own tablet that was wirelessly connected to the LAN, but that's not happening any time soon, and you'd still be screwed when the LAN went down. It's barely dented paper consumption and vastly increased the amount of headaches and frustration, particularly with regards to relatively simple and common tasks. It's really neat and helpful for a few things that it works well with, but other than that, it just sucks.
If you're really concerned with the use of paper, just continue to use it and spend the difference from the huge amount of money it costs to try to go paperless on planting some more forests.
Purveyors of Online Storage Call for End to Systems That Don't Require Online Storage. Film at 11?
Seriously, folks, before you put all your business records in the hands of another company (which keeps its own internal policies and procedures deathly secretive, and which may or may not decide to define you as a 'competitor' at some time in the future, or may already have done so for all you know) - think for a moment.
Google, you can pry paper out of my dead cold hands.
I once stand at Costco optical dept - and a customer/patient show the Costco staff the Rx glass on his iphone/cell phone email.
Guess what? They don't accept digitize image/RX prescription - only real RX prescription only - so that patient has to go back to his
doctor and request real paper RX.
Likewise, I see customer showing off their coupon to store on their phone - only to be told - no, we don't accept screen image.
So why shouldn't I print out to the printer?
We'll have paperless offices sometime after the paperless toilet is perfected. People like paper. This will be a generational shift and the paperless generation isn't in power yet.
Organization? You must be joking..
A business still has to interact with other businesses that are not members of the initiative, including the government with jurisdiction over the territory where it is headquartered.
The only standard in his list is email, everything else might look like it at first glance but is not.
An enterprise web page to download a document:ie6, flash, applet, activeX control or other buggy plugin required (seen it done)
An email with encryption: some inhouse encryption tool which most likely comes with a windows only decrypt tool (done so by my bank)
A pdf : Requires version x of Adope Reader, wont open in any other pdf reader (done so by my university - they used some nice but exotic pdf features that apparently only the adope reader implements)
email: correction to the statement above, not even email is a safe standard. I have seen enough emails that required specific email clients to open the attachment, others only got a useless DAT file.
Standards are nice and all, but in the real world doing things right is hard, so people in leading positions do it wrong once and everyone else has to live with it. The situation only gets worse when you realise that a lot of people profit from bad solutions. Someone has to develop the overly complicated download page, the email encryption tool and the producers of Adope Reader and the email client wont be happy either if they could be replaced with a low maintance/cost standard solution, the result is a lot of bulshitting "standard solutions are not user friendly/not secure enough/...".
Paperless fax isn't stupid, its a way for a paperless office to interface with offices (and individuals) that remain paperful without, itself, becoming paperful.
I am not at all impressed with the current state of electronic communications and I especially am not impressed by fronts with skin in the game who want you to pay them to do shit that should be accomplished between peers over an IP network for free.
Email is a sad pathetic sorry useless joke. If it is not the endless stream of junk mail it is legitimate messages being silently discarded by some crazy baysian monster. When you do get a message you take a leap of faith assuming the sender is actually who you think it is or that it has not been altered in transit.
If you really want to get someones attention especially if it is to get them to pay a bill snail mail still works better than electronic delivery.
I have never been the type that prints out anything..if the printer stopped working I would never know it. I just think on the tools side no real progress has been made on the inter-office front. Intra-office is a different matter.
I should be able to transfer documents directly between interested parties using common protocols that actually work. I should not have to pay middlemen to convert faxes or store confidential documents on servers which are not a natural party to the communication and only provide value because a legitimate solution does not exist.
If people are still using paper perhaps you can blaim them for being old fashioned yet I would not be at all surprised if they have legitimate reasons for doing it that have simply not been seriously addressed.
We went paperless 2 years ago, we now generate 4 times the amount of paper we did prior to going paperless.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
My thought exactly :)
Wasn't a patent troll shown in a previous Slashdot article called "Project Paperless LLC"? And this is called Paperless 2013 project? I assume they are completely unrelated, correct?
Digital trails are easy to destroy. Paper trails are much harder to destroy. They can be your enemy or your ally. Having paper reports is always the ally of an ethical business.
Our office went paperless but management took it too far when they also removed the toilet paper! When we complained about not having paper to clean our nether regions, we were told that company policy was that everything should be done digitally! Boom! Boom!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
"Alright. Here's how we're doing things from now on. If you can't adjust by the end of the month, you'll be replaced."
>" For the first time, it's easy to sign, fax, and store documents without ever printing a piece of paper. It's finally fast and simple to complete paperwork and expense reports, to manage accounting, pay bills and invoice others."
What a load of crap. Seems more like an advertisement for commercial stuff. Sorry, but I work in the real world. Not everything "paperless" is easy to work with. And worse, the suggested method of "solving" the problem just moves a lot of it to "the cloud", putting confidential (and in our case HIPAA) stuff into the hands of various outside companies. There are concerns with accountability, backup, storage, security, compliance, file formats, and other factors. Then add internet bandwidth, compatibility, training users, signature legalities, encryption, resolution, and interaction with other companies to the mix and this is not an "easy as pie" solution as the slashvertizement would imply. Nor have these proposed "solutions" suddenly just appeared "now".
Look, I agree there is far to much paper flowing around. And I do my part to try and reduce as much of it as possible, when I see waste or inappropriate use. But it is just myopic uptopianism to believe that paper can't also be economical and easy for many situations.... sometimes the best solution is not the newest or most electronic or "cloud" one.
As a VoIP engineer, faxes are my own personal hell. No matter how hard we try, no matter what technology we implement, the best case scenario I've ever seen using faxes over any VoIP technology is around 98%. For a residential customer that uses a few faxes a year, the failures are infrequent enough that they don't care.
But for a doctor's office (who sometimes has to fax medical records to insurance providers), attorney's offices, real estate agents.. these people depend on faxes, and they expect 100% reliability. And even if they never print the document themselves, faxes fail.
No, you can't simply E-mail the PDF. They'll come up with a lot of reasons why, which just come down to "faxes aren't E-mail."
Try the civil service they love hard copies. The photocopier and printer just meant they could make more copies.
I prefer to read paper over reading the computer screen. It's a matter of resolution - get me a computer screen with a minimum PPD of 53 (i.e., iPad or better), and I'm OK with it.
So instead of planting millions of trees (these days, in most places, paper comes from farmed trees), you're going to destroy the tree-planting business, and wind up with fewer trees on the planet. What a swell idea. You know there are more chickens than ever before right? I eat about 100 chickens every year. Chickens are probably the most successful bird species on Earch.
And whereas I can have tend pages of paper on my desk, I can't have more than six on my screens -- and I have six thousand dollars of screens on my desk. And I still can't highlight or sketch a diagram on my screens with any degree of ease and precision.
And as for the environment, you're going to replace farmed and then recycled and then composted paper for electricity and plastic and garbage and mercury. Again, good idea.
I certainly see how Google benefits. But not how humans nor the environment benefit at all.
Yeah, no kidding.
So a group of corporations create an entity to promote a "paperless" work environment and simultaneously start enforcing some patent through a shell company to literally extort people to drive them away from competing technology--paper.
Fortunately, for all of us that think this shit is ridiculous, they've kindly supplied us with a list of the people responsible. It's right there in the summary...
http://www.paperless2013.org/about.php
The timing of these two articles on /. was no accident--somebody is trying to publicly out these fuckers, and rightfully so, IMHO.
...is the only way this will happen. And in my experience, 3 monitors are the sweet spot for programmers. Primary monitor is for IDE. 2nd monitor is for program output (usually GUI or Web Browser nowadays). 3rd monitor is for Functional/Technical Design Specifications. You also need a dry erase board for difficult problems and/or quick memos if you're trying to eradicate paper completely.
At my work, I have 2 monitors and still have to print out the Functional Design because of this. Although, I also thoroughly enjoy physically "checking" off a bullet point in the spec. Perhaps we need a digital dry erase board. I even use Linux which has multiple workspaces. I generally fill about 2-3 other workspaces with Thunderbird, terminals, etc. Lastly, as a human with a bad memory, I still need post-it notes every now and then when going to someone else's office.
"cool story, bro" version: It's too expensive, even in the long term (having to maintain the extra digital devices).
The G
Sustainable forestry means young trees sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. More paper, less recycling (bury it all), more trees, less carbon.
So if you are a proponent of carbon reduction because you are an AGW believer, you should be opposed to paper and wood conservation and recycling and you should be supportive of renewable forestry.
Ok, instead of using scanners, use a DSLR camera on a mount in a lightbox with a WiFi card and remote control.
There are ways to encapsulate idiocy using even more of it while still achieving the desired result.
10,000 pieces of year on average for each office working. Give me a break. Unless they're counting prints of pages of Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Twilight and 50 Shades, along with the NY Times.
Working at a defense research lab, I went from a papered to a paperless office as I moved to projects with higher levels of national security classification. At the highest security levels, printing something involves writing a paper log entry, attaching cover and back sheets, entering the document into accountability and storing it in a safe. I used to like the mulling-over of data images that paper seemed to make more comfortable but I got over it. We all did. Even today I can see the degree of paperless-ness go up as I go from the areas of the building doing unclassified work to the locked vaults where we keep the dead aliens.
... but I still think it is true today:
"The paperless office is as much of a reality as the paperless toilet"
- TWR, Redondo Beach, California
Actually, no. If you run paperless, you don't use scanners (what would you scan if you have no papers?).
Most people at my office still print email and leave it on my chair instead of just forwarding it. They look at me like I eat children for lunch when I tell them that I don't even have a printer at home.
Most images of Head of States signing something into a law show that person actually signing with ink on paper. Suppose that were to be digital ? Could that set a trend to actually implement paperlessness ?
If I swivel my chair 90 degrees I can see some boxes full of reels of tape from the 1980s. So long as the stuff wasn't stored in a sauna for 30 years there's still a decent chance that they are 100% readable (going by the example of the last couple of dozen reels).
The stuff is not fragile, just prone to getting lost or thrown out (which is why the last couple of dozen reels were read in, somebody threw out the originals and wanted the copy they sent to us in the 1980s). People don't take it as seriously as they later hope they had.
Oh, you want a hard copy? Go this this and click print. No I'm not going to mail you one, you want hard copy use your own paper and ink.
Everything's in webspace. I gave up paper in late 1990.
I did buy an Epson pigment ink pritner to print photos for fun, but absolutely everything is a file; I use about a a square foot and a half of paper a year. Mostly writing very short grocery list and perhaps the odd phone number.
The first year was admittedly hard, but after that... pffffft. What a difference. And you DO get used to it.
If you can't knock out something to manage all your paper online and get it up and running in about 6 months, you're incompetent.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Can we all just standardize and get along?
You mentioned the relevant standards already:
Imagine a world where instead, you dealt with:
So really, be glad that the worst of your problems is that one company uses PDF, another encrypts the PDF, another encrypts the email, and another makes you go to a website on the Internet. We could live in a much worse world.
I say we should create a new invoice standards, lets say a .IVN to unify all of these standards.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
An easier paper saving strategy would be to eliminate all print newspapers first. See how that goes, then continue with the millions of offices where paper is used.
I did my dissertation on the paperless office. I concluded (in 2003) that it was a long way off for a few reasons:
1. People who grew up with understanding knowledge on paper will continue to do so regardless of changing technology. e.g A CEO who prints out his emails or a lawyer who only files signed original documents
2. Even Microsoft/Apple had to adapt their PC technology to the "old fashioned" office worker. Why do we think icons are placed "on the desktop" and we have filing cabinets, folders and files as representations of data? With storage and search like Google technically you should never have to file anything away, just type in some key words - who cares where it is stored! But the majority did not grow up with this mental vision of data storage.
3. Signatures have legal underpinning through thousands of years of common law that can't disappear overnight.
A few things will change this over time:
1. As high school students dispense with paper we will see a change at the bottom of organisations that will take a few generations to filter upwards (as older people are in positions of power and will try and keep a redundant job at all costs).
2. The price of paper/commodities (e.g ink) may rise much faster than inflation forcing companies to adapt to spiralling costs
A company I used to work for tried to go paperless after I showed a couple of managers that everything was way faster electronically than on paper. I demonstrated it by doing things the old fashioned way: Print document, alter it with pen/marker, scan it, and upload it back. Took about 15 minutes. I did it in about 30 seconds or less electronically. No differences between the outcomes of the two methods except for time.
They made a big push for it, but in the end upper management wouldn't budge. They didn't know how to do it on computer, didn't want to learn, didn't even HAVE to do it, but insisted that everyone had to do it like they did. I didn't bother. I kept doing it the old way. As a result I'd process 10-20x documents more than other people would day by day.
The absolute best part of it? Having 500 blank pages in a folder on my desk to make it look like I was doing it by hand. Never got caught and eventually the company went under.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
In our office they seem to have started with the toilets. By 3:00 pm you have to go from cubicle to cubicle to find one with some paper left!
Ever noticed people no longer read e-mails? They see the first 2 lines, decide to reply later, then when they do their reply is only about what they remember. Best to put any complex text in an attachment - they might even print it and take it seriously. I want a format which cannot be read *unless* it is printed. Ideas?
We went paperless 2 years ago, we now generate 4 times the amount of paper we did prior to going paperless.
This is reality. I work with lots of offices that have been paperless for years. They all implemented insanely expensive and less than friendly document management systems. They then spent millions scanning all there paper documents into these systems. They all patted themselves on the backs for a job well done because they no longer have the physical storage requirements that they use to.
But all of these places, without exception, now use more paper than ever before. The fact of the matter is that large multipaged documents are more usable in physical form. Because of this, it is common for people to print out the documents when they are going to use them. Going into a meeting, print out the 50 page document. Afterwords, because there is no where to keep it, discard. Going to work on the contract over the weekend? Print out the 30 pages. Got a court case set for next month, print out everything, 5,000 pages, for every lawyer (6) 30,000 pages. After the case, shred it all.
The reality is that where as before there was a printed copy of the document that was stored and shuffled around, the same document has been scanned into an electronic system to go paperless. The same document then gets printed and reprinted five or ten times per year. I will concede that it does save on storage for infrequently used documents.
There will never be a 100% paperless office. Nor do I think there should be. Paper is an excellent medium, wireless, infinite battery life, high contrast, fairly durable, quick response, broad visibility, easily annotated, easily sharable, great persistence, physical...
For the first time, it's easy to sign, fax, and store documents...
Seriously?
The fax is the single biggest consumer of paper our business has. Yep, you guessed right. People will print things out, just so they can stuff them in a fax machine and send them between offices, or down the hall, or (I swear to gawd) straight back into the document management system they came from. And before you suggest scanners and other "modern" tools, know that the tools for avoiding the dead tree loop are already there. There are few things as set in their ways as clerical staff who has "done it this way for years".
So, 10,000 pages per person in a year is about right. An above commentator surmised that to be ~41 pages per person per day when vacation is accounted for. It is 10:50 am and I have already printed about 16 pages of paper. My employees probably have printed more.
In terms of cost, I did a study related to it as we have looked to eliminate as much paper as regulation will allow. $0.007 per page for commercially bought office paper is accurate. So 10,000 pages is only $70 per employee per year. Toner and staples/clips/etc add a marginal cost. As a printer (hence "CMYKjunkie" as my handle) you would pay $0.02 per page black ink only PRINTED, BOUND, AND DELIVERED for laser print quality printing. Even figuring at that higher commercial rate, $200 per employee is rather affordable.
Obviously, I am not figuring other costs such as storage, filing, transport, and on and on and on; but my point is that paper is not an extravagant cost.
My last point is that most posters here work in tech fields/organizations that would likely generate less paper in general. In the rest of the business world, this isn't necessarily so -- you must think beyond your tech company into other fields.
I'm just a regular boring software developer there, but I'm kind of sad to see we're not on the list of members, now, being that our company is all *about* removing paper from offices. Would have been such a great message for kicking off our annual user conference next week. I'm sure "member" equals "put in bucketloads of money", though.
I have to deal with complex technical information. It is easier to read a document on paper than on a computer screen. It is much harder to actually study a document on paper than on a screen.
I'll believe it when the US is metric, we have commercial fusion generators, and offices go paperless. Maybe in 20 years...
Not always idiocy. Sounds like a project I actually worked on called PhotoDocs (though not the hardware; that was just something the owner of the company thought would be fun to make to show off the software). The software, which did eventually get released as a tool bundled with the main client application (though I don't think it contained any of the code we wrote by that point), would help you batch "scan", import and OCR images taken using a regular digital camera, which was actually a pretty neat idea, if you want to "scan" a bunch of documents (or even other things with textual information on them; we had some great test images of signs, plaques, etc.) while you're not at the office, but you want them in your document repository later when you get back.
As I said, while we were working on the software as a R&D type project, the owner of the company put together basically just a box you could stick a camera in and it would give you the optimal results. Totally silly, but hey, it worked pretty well (sort of defeated the purpose, though, being that the software was supposed to help you OCR pictures taken in *not* totally optimal conditions...)
I'm sure those trolls would try to sue photodocs users just the same if they could, though. Patent trolls don't really work based on "is this infringement", they work on "can we sue people who won't fight back" :p.
The reason folks still use paper is because it actually works for their needs. (I am a software analyst so the first thing I do is look at the current processes).
For example, write down some notes on that 25 page pdf you're reading then find them next week.
Test it against a printout with the same notes written on the paper. Computer word search vs flipping pages. Test it yourself.
Paper works in bright sunlight, too. And I can lay out 10 sheets of paper to look at simultaneously or unroll a giant chart and take in the whole thing at once. I can't do anything nearly as -quick- with a laptop screen.
In many situations and processes, using paper is _faster_ than electronics. We don't use electronics for fun or for ideology, we use them because they are faster than what we used before. And when electronics is not faster, regular people figure that out a lot quicker than analysts working with pure theory (which was probably written on paper because mathematical equations aren't that ez to write with electronics either)..
The first thing I recommend is to aleays keep a physical/paper backup of documents. Often computer record records are insufficient proof plus it's only a matter of time before losing or corrupting digital records,
Careful with eco arguments for going paperless. Do you really think paper producers are forest poachers, who surreptitously cut down thousands of trees for some profit?
Paper makers plant new trees, care for forests, keep them healthy, make sure that their way of living is sustainable. Paper producers use recyclable resources -trees- and care for them.
Computer screens require rare earths and toxic materials, use energy, harm eyesight and are hard to recycle. Costs of implementation por paperless offices can be way high. Culture change can be a very difficult hurdle. Has all this been taken into account, before trying to go paperless just because "we have the technology"?
Check paper makers so as to make sure they recycle waste paper and plant new forests; do not plan to put them out of business just because they cut down trees (most everything we eat comes from killing an animal or cutting down a plant, and that's not antiecologic, it is highly sustainable). As someone above said: go paperless for a reason, not for a fad or an undigested idea.
And, no, I am in no way related to paper makers.