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

Re:It's pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, it cannot be hacked

It can't easily be remotely hacked, but plenty of paper-based information has ended up where it shouldn't through physical exploits. It can be photographed or copied without leaving any trace in any log files.

and won't crash

It will, however, burn. It's also quite susceptible to flood damage, as many organisations who relied on paper documents without remote electronic backup have discovered to their cost.

It's also not searchable or readily encryptable.

Overall YES - but privately - no.

[MindPrison]

And what do I mean by that? Here's how I see it (and I work in advertisement were we use paper more than most companies):

The newspapers (physical format) is struggling like mad, it's dying a hard slow death that the editors and older people desperately tries to fight rather than deny. Deny it - is what they tried to do 15 years ago, today they KNOW better, but really struggle with digital media. For this reason it will still live on, but only for a limited period of time (untill the old folks go to bed forever, cynical - but true).

My neighbors are roughly around 70 to 90 years old, they've lived here practically all of their lives, most of them have a computer but they confess they rarely use it, they basically use it to read mails from their kids and pay bills via online banking because they are too old and tired to go to the bank physically, if they had an alternative (someone drove them) they'd prefer that (yes, I'm basically the neighborhood IT guy so I hear them!).

Personally I absolutely HATE my physical mailbox. There are basically TWO things I find in there, one is more overpowering than the other and needs constant attention, namely ADVERTISEMENT in paper form. For me, they usually go directly from the mailbox to the paper-recycling dumpster can we have, I don't even bother to read them, they are more a nuisance than practical. But the OLD people love them, it's basically their only source of information (and I kid you not!).

At work we sometimes print copies because in advertisement we NEED to see if the ads look good on print, this is proofing and we can't really do without that process. But we use as little paper as we have to, the boss hate wasting print colour and paper, and we don't like the manual handling of the endless paper mountains either, so the less - the better.

At home I like to decorate the walls with my own printout collages of the 80s memorabilia, cartoons and video games, so it's basically used as a decorative wallpaper printer for me, other than that - I rarely if ever print anything. In fact...I print so little, that my Hewlett Packard color laser printer 2600n has only had ONE set of cartridges in it since I bought it 10 years ago, and gathers dust under a chair somewhere in the hall, I take it out if I need to send some hardcopy to the government (who are still super-old-fashioned in Sweden and wants everything in hardcopy prints).

I sometimes work for the school system as a substitute teacher when I'm out of graphics jobs at work, and at school we use the copier heavily, it gets a run all day long, that's because the teachers are in love with giving kids assignements on paper since it basically keeps them occupied all the time. This ain't going away anytime soon either.

Paper? What's that

[decipher_saint]

I've been working in a paperless office for 6 years now. I don't even bother with scratch notes anymore, just OneNote and/or a whiteboard + phone camera

Our fax/printer has been out of toner for 2 years... and so far nobody has needed it (out of ~20 people)

The only paper product we get anymore is the crap that comes in the mail slot we throw out... I don't even think about it anymore. Which is odd really, place I worked at before generated mountains of paper (even for scrum, we were using cardstock and pins on a cube wall rather than an app, g'gah, how did we even generate reports back then???)

Anyway, the only thing I miss is doodling I guess.

Make the users accountable

[EvilSS]

One of my customers has reduced their printing by ~90% by simply requiring a badge-swipe at the printer to actually print their documents and using reporting to work with heavy printer users to reduce their usage. When the user knows that their usage is being monitored they start to ask "Do I really need to print this?" Most of the time the answer is no. Paper records are still kept where required, but all those transient documents that everyone printed out of habit dropped off drastically. This allowed the company to reduce their printer count, reduce consumables costs, reduce maintenance costs, reduce document disposal costs, and increased security (the custom deals with a lot of sensitive financial information, so reduced printing reduced the effort required to make sure users disposed of their documents correctly and reduced the chances that a document with sensitive information ended up in a dumpster and not a shredder truck).