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

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).