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."

Comments

Good luck with that

[crazyjj]

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.

Re:Good luck with that

[interkin3tic]

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.

You're lucky. At universities where I've worked, there is a shadow board of decision makers who decree that any new change, such as e-mail, must be mangled together with the old ways. The result is idiotic and more frustrating than had they simply stuck with the old way.

For instance, an accounting software update meant that all employees had to be updated every quarter. You'd think this could be done automatically, but it was decided that in order to make sure employees who had left weren't automatically put back into the system, you'd have to respond that yes, you were still there. At some point it was updated to where an e-mail would suffice BUT you weren't allowed to respond with an e-mail or edit the PDF. The PDF was e-mailed to you, you printed it out, try to write in legibly, walk it over to the office, and then they'd complain that they couldn't read it. All to let the office know that you hadn't suddenly quit without telling them. This, by the way, had nothing to do with payroll, which was a whole separate system. There was no danger that they'd send you extra paychecks, this was basically to make sure you didn't keep your printer access.

Re:Good luck with that

[fermion]

I agree. Most office workers will refuse to update their habits. Some of these workers may actually be valuable enough to keep protocols the same. However, with the unemployment the way it is,particularly among highly educated young people, and the ease of shedding older unproductive workers, the problems cannot be attributed to the worker.

Rather, the managers have to be complicit. After all, if a worker learned how to do things in 1987, then the managers probably did not every have computers in school, probably still used chalkboards. And they have to keep everything simply enough so they could manage. If all they know is MS Office, and it took them a year of training to learn it, then they are not likely going to do something like Google Docs. There will be one minor cosmetic feature in MS Office which they consider invaluable.

I have worked places where the amont of papar passed around is tiny. I have been in places where the managers print email to file. You are correct in that this will require training at the entry level. Already many colleges have little paper. We are getting to the point where even high schools are going paperless. But if you think you have problems with employes destroying equipment so they do not have to work, you can't imagine what an issue it is in high school.

Re:Good luck with that

[CanHasDIY]

Because changing financial regulations and laws practically requires an act of Congress to accomplish many times, so the old way stands - no matter how repulsively outdated and impractical it is.

If you've ever had someone you were in contract with try and pull a fast one by presenting an altered photocopy of the original agreement, you would not think the practice quite so impractical.

Re:Good luck with that

[geekoid]

He sure it's easy, and don't give them a choice.
They learned faxing, and they can learn not walking to the fax machine and pushing a button on their screen to send a fax.

I have heard your complaint, and seen it proven false over and over again, when people aren't given the choice. Changes takes energy, so natural the brain rebels against it.

If they still don't get it? give them warning, write them up and fire them.

Re:Good luck with that

[TWX]

A computer architecture from the eighties is still newer than a computer architecture developed in the sixties and seventies by a telephone company, which the bulk of the planet runs on derivations of.

The current iSeries machine we have dates to about two years ago. Before that mini we had an older iSeries mini, and before that we had another AS/400 mini. Before that we had a Honeywell, and at some point they had a Wang. These computers have handled employment records, payroll, enrollment records, equipment records, and all government reporting requirements with minimal downtime during operating hours. Come to think of it, the last time that we had long-term unscheduled downtime was when the roof collapsed in a rainstorm and the eight inches of water the computer was sitting in demanded that it be shut down.

Get rid of printers

[Russ1642]

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.

Re:Get rid of printers

[Jetra]

You're just making excuses. I can review things just fine and I don't need to keep several papers in front of me. It's called a brain and notepad.

Re:Get rid of printers

[tlhIngan]

You're just making excuses. I can review things just fine and I don't need to keep several papers in front of me. It's called a brain and notepad.

And how many screens? Let's take a typical development task - I've seen two independent people come up with requirement specification, of which a third requirement spec has to be generated (the first is what marketing wants a product to do, the second is what engineering wants the product to do, the third is what your little chunk of the entire project is supposed to do).

And from that, distill a test plan which has a requirements matrix that ties back to both original documents and the distilled document (tracability - every feature listed must be testable and tested).

Oh, and the first two documents change. A lot. It may be a numbering change, but that means all the documents need to change to adapt, and ensuring that it all matches up again, so you have to have all 4 documents open at once. Short of having four monitors to view them all simultaneously, it's a alt-tab nightmare.

Toss in a fifth document (say, documentation on your chunk - like how stuff interfaces), and now you have to also ensure your interface headers are up to date as well, AND ensure your requirements doc is still complete to have that document integrated into it (and testable!).

Oh, and that notepad? Paper. So you have to have notepad.exe open as well.

And I have been known to be the assinine QA tester who would chew out a developer if their tests weren't up to snuff. Not because it made me happy, but because I understood the value of ensuring that everything matched up. If you omit a step, I'd call you out because the next person who runs the test may not know that and mark a fail on something that should've passed.

Complete tracability and repeatability - when that software goes out the door, I can say the test plan met the requirements, point out how it matched up, and that if someone else took the same build out of code control and same version of the documents, they can repeat the same tests and have the same results. Because 6 months down the road, someone will ask "did we test this?" and "How did we test this?" and "Customer says it doesn't work". In which case I can either say - "oops, we didn't htink to test it" (new requirement and test case), or "oops, we didn't know the customer wanted it this way" (new requirement), or "yes we did, and here's how ew did it, and I can run it again to double-check". (Maybe customer got an engineering build and it failed because of a regression).

Re:Get rid of printers

[Hatta]

This is why computers have interfaces with overlapping windows, and good computers have interfaces with virtual desktops. The workflow is pretty simple. Open all your documents on desktop 1. Move them one at a time to desktop 2. On desktop 2, take the notes you need and classify them appropriately. When done, move them to desktops 3 or 4(or 5 or 6) depending on how you classified them. You can add as many desktops as you need to simulate as many stacks as you need.

Re:Get rid of printers

[jbengt]

No, AC had it right. It's possible for me to review a .pdf containing 50 scanned 42"x36" drawings against CAD files of revised drawings on screen, while referencing calculations in a speadsheet and manufacturer's data in a web browser - but it's extremely slow & painful to do so without printing out at least a couple of those things (especially large .pdfs)

I call...

[AmiMoJo]

... 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.

Take care if you do. You could get sued by trolls.

[Moray_Reef]

Patent trolls want $1,000â"for using scanners

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/patent-trolls-want-1000-for-using-scanners/

About 30 pages per day?

[TheNinjaroach]

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.

Project Paperless LLC

[tepples]

Will businesses think the startup cost of roughly $1000 per employee is worth it?

Re:Project Paperless LLC

[mspohr]

If it's never printed, then it can't be scanned.

project paperless?

[cashman73]

They might want to rethink using the name Project Paperless, or variants thereof. Trolls could sue them,. . . ;-)

Heard that one before:

[Hartree]

You remember when they told us about the "paperless office" the last time round?

They lied!

Beware the ecological fallacy

[betterunixthanunix]

That average probably includes people who work in offices where they print hundreds or even thousands of invoices per day.

Re:Beware the ecological fallacy

[jedidiah]

...or law offices where it's all about the production of paper.

Some fields are just heavy on the documentation. Takei style hysterics aren't going to solve anything.

Re:Beware the ecological fallacy

[AmiMoJo]

But an average of 10,000 sheets for all office workers? Unless there are a few producing several billion pages a year by themselves to account for all the office workers who produce hardly any it just doesn't add up.

Re:A matter of price.

[TFAFalcon]

Well 3. is out without 3.2 a full local backup.
Your host could be raided by the police at any time (since some of their other customers may be doing things that someone thinks may be illegal).

I think I might mind

[Trepidity]

I can't say I'd mind getting rid of the stacks of paper HR sends me.

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.

Re:I think I might mind

[gnu-sucks]

This is so true.

Going paperless for the sake of paperless is dangerous. Going paperless because you have the technology (and user interface) to do so, and you think you have something to gain (such as increased simplicity, search capability, archival ease, etc) -- then there's a reason.

Yep

[ctaylor]

It's just a scam to get people to scan documents and email them so they can get sued...

5 years ago? B.S.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I'm all for it ... HOWEVER we need...

[Bomarc]

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?

Re:I'm all for it ... HOWEVER we need...

[wonkey_monkey]

Can we all just standardize and get along?

That's "standardise."

Re:I'm all for it ... HOWEVER we need...

[betterunixthanunix]

Can we all just standardize and get along?

You mentioned the relevant standards already:

• email
• PDF
• OpenPGP or S/MIME
• HTTP

Imagine a world where instead, you dealt with:

1. Invoices sent by Facebook messages
2. Invoices sent via Myspace messages
3. Invoices sent via LinkedIn messages
4. Invoices that you had to dial in to an online service to receive
5. Invoices with EBCIDIC encoding
6. Invoices sent as MS Word formatted files
7. Fly-by-night startup of the month's proprietary invoice system, that places contextual ads in your invoices

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.

10,000 Pages!? (New Tool Album)

[sandysnowbeard]

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.

Paper = Insurance

[retroworks]

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.

Important documents should be on paper

[mschaffer]

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

Give me these tools and we have a deal

[rickb928]

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.

Paper Trails cut both ways

[tyrione]

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.

Re:In this economy...

[rpresser]

One year later ...

"Hello? The idiot we replaced you with has lost an entire year worth of documents. We've fired him. Please come back."

Re:Bullshit

[jrumney]

Read the legislation. Electronic signatures are not digital signatures, but simple bitmaps added to PDF and Word documents to make them look like ink signatures, but without any of the security of requiring actual pen-ink rather than a copy.

Use more paper, its good for the climate

[jmkrtyuio]

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.

Paperless Office? That's Classified.

[Mr. Jackson]

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.