Slashdot Asks: Is Paperless Office a Dream? (betanews.com)

A new report by Danwood, which surveyed 1,000 office workers, almost half said that they print something every day and 84 percent said printing things on paper at work was an "important aspect of work." In the past, we have seen a trend growing at many workplaces where things are moving increasingly digital, implying strongly that our reliance on paper must be reducing as a result. From a report: Danwood even cites a recent IDC research which says 49 percent of business expect their print volumes to increase over the next two years. Eight in ten (80 percent) of respondents say they need paper documents to get their job done. "Despite a move to digitization, organizations remain reliant on print", says Danwood CEO Wes Mulligan. "Businesses are mindful of unnecessary waste when it comes to physical documents, but print and digital will continue to coexist in today's organizations. The easiest way to strike a balance is to look at ways that you can better integrate paper and digital processes to have a real impact on efficiency, productivity and cost reduction."What do you guys think? Will we ever hit a stage where paper will have a minimal footprint, if at all, at workplaces?

Update: Reader argStyopa shares his views on why paper is here to stay, and for good: (1) Paper is portable and readable in all circumstances. I don't need to fire up a reader, connect to Wi-Fi, turn on a laptop, whatever: here's your piece of paper, read it.
(2) Paper is durable and fixed-format: if I put a paper in a file and come back 10 or even 100 years later, barring catastrophe, it'll still be there. The vagaries of non-cloud storage, and (for the cloud) the evolution of e-storage and e-doc formats means that even if I HAVE the file, I might not be able to read/open it. I have enough trouble opening now 25-year-old docs from my college days plunking on a MacSE.
(3) It's harder to edit paper: simply put, e-docs are easier to fake, generally.

Comments

Shipping documents

[Jake73]

The only thing we regularly print is shipping documents and invoices for customers that don't have electronic invoice acceptance. Outside of these items, maybe... 1-5 pages per month are printed?

All incoming paper documents are scanned and shredded.

Re:It's pointless

[Dutch Gun]

Paperless is already the norm in offices where I work, and has been for the last decade. Then again, I make videogames for a living, so maybe people who create a product made up of bits and bytes are used to working entirely electronically. Our internal documents are online in Wikis or Confluence, we use online bug trackers, we use e-mail and instant messaging and web chat to communicate. And of course, the work we do is entirely digital too.

Sure, we occasionally print things out for convenience, but that's the rare exception, not the rule. I can think of perhaps two occasions in the last six months I've done so, both times for meetings in which I needed everyone to follow along with my presentation. Not everyone has a portable electronic device that's synced to company e-mail (I prefer to keep my phone personal). If that ever becomes the norm, then I'd have just e-mailed everyone the docs ahead of time.