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.

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

[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).

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.