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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.
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.
I think the paperless office is pointless. Sometimes physical paper cannot be replaced, and the convenience cannot be matched.
Around the same time as the paperless bathroom - or washroom, restoom, WC, toilet or whatever your local venacular is for the place where one voids oneself.
After twenty years of discussion, short answer is yes. People love tactile things. One could argue it is part of human nature to touch and feel among other things. So yes, this is a dream that will not be realized for some time to come.
Well which is it, 8 in 10 or 80%?
Is there some system where "8 in 10" would mean something other than "8 out of 10" which also means 8/10 = 0.80 = 80% ?
I guess in base 9? Base 16?
Or should I have just used the smart-ass response of "yes"?
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.
Walk by any printer in any office. There'll be a stack of printouts that the originators never remembered to pick up.
Next, look at the stack of printed emails; many of which are printouts of an email reply-to chain, meaning the last mail has all the content of the other 20.
Then look at the people who print out a document, redline it with a pen, then type the redlines into the softcopy file they just printed out.
Personally, I blame the Electron Lobby. Those dang charge-carriers are getting way too lazy about their job of keeping computers running.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
"I don't print stuff, so there's no way anyone anywhere could possibly need to print either."
Maybe someday we can finally get rid of fax machines.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
TSIA.
Since I need to add more to satisfy the /. posting god, my point is that
1) paper is portable and readable in all circumstances. I don't need to fire up a reader, connect to wifi, turn on 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 estorage and edoc formats means that even if I HAVE the file, i might not be able to read/open it. Shit, 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, edocs are easier to fake, generally.
There are a host of things that paper isn't: searchable, stored effortlessly taking no space, easily (instantly) sent to someone else not present, backed up in case of loss, there are probably a ton of others. But the fact is that for what paper does, and what's important in a business/legal context, it's pretty irreplaceable.
-Styopa
I see a lot of paperless discussions often revolve around one part of a process or one thing. Replace a single system, or put out PDF readers that can sign and call it paperless.
No.
If you want paperless you need to think from the top down, all work processes and all interactions. Documents needed to be easier to retrieve than reaching down to the filing cabinet. People need to be able to jot down notes with a tablet and hit send faster than handing someone a piece of paper. Your processes can't rely on having a wet signature somewhere along the way and you need the information management systems to ensure people don't lose something.
My office is paperless. I do most of my notes and storage in One Note (for better or worse). I have PDF editors which support pen input, and my company at least has a very reasonably implemented document management system. I take notes in meetings and they hit people's inboxes before the first person gets to a scanner. I sketch changes to documents and send them back without the stupid printing step in between, and even in cases where people insist they need a signature on something surprise surprise most can't tell the difference or don't care about the difference between printed and signed and scanned forms, and forms which I just scribble directly into the PDF file and then flatten (this includes most government agencies I've dealt with which is the biggest surprise).
If you want to go paperless, do it.
I still use a paper notebook to write notes when I get a call. I still print out papers that I need for a meeting. Why? Because it is easier than to look through files and find the correct one.
I often print out emails I want to discuss with a cow orker when I walk to his desk. Much easier than sending an email for most things where I do not need a trail.
Having the printout with be saves me time as I do not need to search for it or ask somebody else to look for it.
And I am not even talking about those parts where contracts are involved that have to be handled by paper as they are not valid by law and we are just starting to get all that in an electronic form. Technically it is possible, people are not yet completely used to it.
Will there be a lot less paper be used? Yes. Many times printing things out is not needed. e.g. to look up contracts that where scanned need only seldom be printed out. Not every time I need feedback, I need to go to a cow orker. An email wil be good enough.
So less paper? Yes! Paperless? No!
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
At my company, we VERY rarely print anything, or receive anything on paper. I think that's related to the fact that we have offices in several countries, with which we interact regularly. Paper is poor way of getting information from Texas to Colombia and Ukraine. As more companies become geographically dispersed, their use of paper will reduce further.
...until there is universal, reliable and inviolable security on digital systems.
The printed document is still more reliable than the hard disk or flash drive, all care having been taken in all cases.
Courts still require "copies" of printed documents, not the assertion that a flash drive is representative.
We've got a long way to go. Technology is about what SELLS, not about the best long-term solution for endemic problems.
People in their 20's don't seem to have much use for hardcopy.
Which is why, when their phone dies or they can't get a connection, they can't figure out how to read a paper map.
Yes, yes, we're talking about offices but the point stands. Instead of having a physical piece of paper in ones hand which can be immediately shown with others, we have to wait while these folks hunt through their phone or computer to pull up a document on a small screen. It's also easier to read a paper document than on a screen.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
sadly, it's still a dream. As sending a note through an e-mail takes so much more time than handing over a piece of paper to someone, finding the information on a note that you've written is much easier than going through hundreds of e-mails, having connectivity issues, hardware issues and battery issues... a pen and paper is "cheap". there is too many things that are more easily done with pen and paper or printed on a piece of paper that we still have many years ahead of us that we will still retain the ability to use our writing skills, for the better or worse...
Finding written notices is only easier if it was relatively recent and you know roughly where to look -- just try finding that note you wrote down in a conversation with Bob 6 months ago. Paging through 100 pages of handwritten notes is going to take longer than typing "from:bob after:2016/4/17 before:2016/5/16 subject:widgets"
And if you're at home but left your notepad at work (or vice versa), then you're not going to be able to find it at all.
That said, I find I retain more information when I take notes on paper than when I type them. I still tend to take meeting notes by computer (since I often want to check calendars, etc), but if I'm attending a seminar or other session where I want to learn and retain new information, I take notes on paper. I rarely refer to the notes, but taking the notes helps me retain information.
Too many people who need to print out the Excel sheet, add the numbers on a desk calculator, fax it somewhere where it arrives as a over email PDF, print out that PDF so it can be faxed somewhere else to get it to someone who needs it.
Yes
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Ben
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.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I need paper for technical documents; non-contiguous reading such has quickly flipping between equations and figures located on different pages than text. Screens suck for that.
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.
crazy dynamite monkey
I just got on line after going to the local office supply store for another ream of printer paper.
and some of those notes can mean the difference between wrecking a box of bits or recovering it.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
What gets me, though, is that printers in general are still a PITA to operate and maintain.
How many times have you gone to print something and found that:
- The margins are screwed up
- The wrong paper tray was selected
- The duplexing was toggled the wrong way
- You meant to print color but forgot to switch it from B&W
- The driver doesn't understand your stupid Adobe PS document and prints 100 pages of jibberish before you realize what's going on.
- A paper jam caused the jobs to back up so instead of unjamming the printer people just print elsewhere... guess what happens when the jam is removed?
The list goes on... the result is something on the order of 30% (not scientific) of the paper in our office is simply thrown in the recycle bin.
Then there are the plotters! Holy crap, the waste! Print out 10 copies of a 30x34" floor plan and realize that the toner is low or some other mundane thing. I am sure that we pay thousands per month to feed and maintain our two KIP plotters. (most or all of that can be billed to clients... but there is still a lot of waste).
Don't get me started on paper towels!
All said and done, I am sure our office alone kills a good sized tree per week. I don't see this changing any time soon. At least not until all technology works seamlessly together. Even then, there is quite a lot to be said about a technology that does not require power to use, can be stored basically forever and everyone understands.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
I work with quite a few people who "need" to print things every day.
First of all, the vast majority of things they print don't require printing in the first place. As an almost stereotypical example, we have one lady who:
* Prints out every PO (that she creates in our ERP system) and puts it in filing cabinet #1.
* When she gets a packing slip, she manually matches them up, staples them together, moves them to cabinet #2, then records the PO as received in the ERP.
* Then when the invoice comes... Ditto, cabinet 3 (if she receives it by email, she actually prints that so she can physically staple them together).
* When she sends payment to the vendor... cabinet 4.
* Finally, when the payment clears, she stamps it as processed and files it away forever in the dungeon, "just in case" she needs to reference it sometime in 2046.
I've tried explaining that she can run a recon right in the ERP for every single phase of that, including attaching emails/PDFs/whatever directly to the workflow, but she doesn't "trust" the computer (aka "once upon a time I screwed up and deleted something, so I'll just do the whole damned thing by hand until the end of time").
Second, also related to trusting computers - I've shown people how to print to PDF. Nope, computer might crash (mind you, we have reliable offsite backups going back to the frickin' 1980s).
Finally, people seem to have a disconnect between the idea of computer files vs paper files. How could they ever find that one invoice among thousands of PDFs? Because y'know, you can't just organize them exactly the same way you do paper files, never mind the fact that you can just search for any bit of text in the document and almost instantly find every reference to WidgetCo going back to the beginning of time.
The paperless office will eventually exist. It just won't arrive until the Boomers and their hatred of trees finally gets the hell out of the workforce.
I realize this isn’t quite on point, but the fact is, I have to do a lot of my mathematical derivations by hand, on paper. I would really stuggle if I were forced to ALWAYS use software to do this, even if it did a lot of the work for me. I could pay for Mathematica, WolframAlpha, and/or Matlab, but those really irritate me. I often use sympy, which is freaking awesome. But sometimes it’s just nice to use pencil and paper.
More on point, if I need to carefully read a document, and I want to flip back and forth to the references section, scribble notes, underline things, dog-ear pages, etc., it’s so much easier with paper. Flipping to the references, especially, is a pain on a computer screen, unless I open the same document twice, which some software won’t even let me do! And reading on paper is just easier on the eyes.
Where I work now, we are entirely paperless, and have been for the past 3 years. It's kinda funny because there's quite a few salespeople that apparently canvas the offices around the area that I work looking for places to sell printer or copier supplies and when we tell them that we don't even have a printer, they are invariably stunned.
Anyways, while I'm aware that it's unusual... it's entirely possible to do if the company decides that's the way they really want to go.
The first step to doing it is to get rid of the printer... don't even have one. If it's not an option, then you don't use it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
As a software developer, I hardly ever print anything out. Last time was maybe 6 months ago.
The only paper on my desk right now is a notepad, 2 post-it note pads and an article about watermelon.
. . . .are documents that require a signature. Which get signed, and then scanned to PDF. . . .
I don't need paper for work. It probably helps that I telecommute, so there is never anyone handing me a piece of paper. When I travel, tickets are all on my phone. Timesheets are online, invoices are online, paychecks are direct deposit. The closest I get to paper is random PDFs.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
also paper works when the power it out.
One more article that poses a false dichotomy. It's not a binary either or. No office or worker can exist in an absolute paperless existence. Even the "paperless office" has to let paper in the door, has to scan it or OCR it for digital retention. And when the power goes out, paper will pop up as a pretty workable temporary fallback *tool*.
And that gets me to the second point, that getting stuck in the "either / or" binary means one stops asking what is the best tool for the job. I try to print out as little as I can. Most things stay digital - until I start designing things or need to jot stuff down super quick. When I'm designing from scratch, trying to structure things, loads of cheeeep paper and good marking tools blow the doors off of digital tools. I can rough out the general structure of anything from a landscape design to a database schema, on paper, faster and better than I can click.
But not everything starts best analog. Most long form writing seems better for me to start and stay digital. I can think and edit text better and faster on screen. For me the real question is what tool is best for a given task, *for a particular person or organization*?
Don't step on the baby.
Last time I printed something was for my home mortgage. For work? Only when HR wants me to sign something. I feel like the whole, I NEED PAPER!!!! Is a boomer thing. My mother literally printed everything for my college applications and funding. After college she hands it me and asks me to file it away. I spent an hour shredding all the paper... Paper sucks and there isn't a need for it anymore.
There are more things in home and office, AC
Then are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
My co-worker (in our in-house printshop) once told me, "I love the paperless society. I've never been busier".
Having been in the web industry for 15 years now, working for 3 different 4000+ employee companies, I've seen several attempts to "go digital".
In each project, I warn the C*O that success of the project does not rely on million-dollar document management software or high-speed scanners, but on creating original documents that are easy to read/understand online.
And I am ignored. And I watch the project fail.
Online reading (reality is: "online scanning") is a whole new world to the office. It's a huge-culture change that needs to happen.
We've all been taught to write the hamburger essay. That doesn't work online. Online requires getting to the point quickly, chunking information with headlines, short paragraphs.
-- If you don't create documents that are easy to consume online, then people will print them off to read them --
Another important success factor: a robust search engine and proper architecture. Again, more things that are ignored and not taught to make paperless a reality. The whole self-service "everyone can add their own document" feature is a horrible idea. Dedicate a resource to manage search and navigation of your document repositories.
4) doodles - I can write on a bit of paper and 'fix it up' then redo in the word processor to send to everyone. Who will never print it off and just read it and forget about it pretty much instantly.
The paperless office is here. There are still some lingering cases where the paperless office does not work. For that we have printers. 99% of what we do is electronic and will never live on a piece of paper. But for those few cases where it does not work we are still good.
... to reduce paper to the absolute minimum. If that is the case, being mostly paperless is a piece of cake.
Bills, contracts, offers, tax-reports and other legal documents, the occasional fridge-note and perhaps Scrum tickets are worthwhile printing and - most imporantly - worthwhile printing well. With good professionally preconfectioned typography and layout. That probably will never change or only in a few decades.
Everything else is utterly pointless to have lying around in paper and a huge waste on top of that.
However, just seeing my collegues printing stacks of powerpoint slides, single sided, to take 3 notes on 50 pages and throw them out 3 weeks later after they have been lying around tells me that 99.999% of the population is just too freakin' dumb to manage a proper transition to a mostly paperless office. When I had a printer, I would go on a stack for years, mostly printing offers and bills and not much more. The ink would dry out three times over before the stack was gone. I would get the inkset out more often than fill up the paper.
Also, MS 0ffice, for some bizar reason the standard today - doesn't really support or encourage paperless working.
But it's also a management thing.
If I had a company I would give everyone printing out stuff by the stack with no second thought an unpleasant verbal asskick. And I'd establish proper digital document management and train my workerbees to use digital documents, versioning and some elaborate search setup. But today managers are often still from the dawn of the web, and not so much into paperless as us computer experts might be.
Hopefully that will change in a decade or two.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'm almost 50 and you're wrong - like a previous poster mentioned, with several monitors on my desk nowadays I print far less than I used to. It depends on the kind of document, though. My father is over 80 and still runs an accounting practice, and a few years ago switched to electronic delivery of protected PDFs. So it's the individuals, not the age.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
The industry I work in (air transport/airlines) has a few things holding it back from being paperless. Non-paper bag tags are only starting to be adopted, and aren't universal. Paper boarding passes are optional these days provided people have mobile check-in apps on their phones and choose to use them. I'm still old school and use paper boarding passes because it's easier to get past the TSA...one less bulky thing to present. (Back when travel agents were selling tickets directly to consumers instead of the consumers booking on the web, the airlines required paper tickets. Tickets were highly controlled documents, since getting your hands on a blank one used to mean you could write yourself a ticket to anywhere and have a reasonable chance of it being accepted!) There was also a huge set of manual processes at each airline to match boarding pass stubs with flight coupons to do the accounting and interline reimbursements...this is mostly gone. A lot of paper is also required to comply with regulations.
The other industries I can't see going totally paperless in the near future are law, finance and healthcare. Electronic signatures, when done right, are secure but not as "believable" as a signed, notarized legal document. Imagine showing up in probate court with a contested estate - will the judge believe the person with the document or the one with an e-signed thing on their phone? Finance may go sooner, with paper checks rapidly disappearing, but large transactional documents like mortgage notes, CDs, etc. fall into that "I have a paper document, so it must be true" category. Finally, healthcare -- I've heard so many stories from colleagues who do healthcare IT. Electronic health records exist, but the standards that exist are loose enough to allow each vendor to make their EHRs slightly incompatible with other vendors' EHRs. So, office staff defaults to faxing everything between doctors' offices. That's why the fax machine (or its virtual IP abstraction) will never die -- for whatever reason it's still considered the only secure way to transmit patient information electronically.
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).
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
This is a *real* issue for the mellineal crowd.
Paper map in a strange city and they might as well be hopelessly lost... even though their destination is literally only a block and a half around a corner.
Solution: tabletop RPG where the map is integral to the game. Get your kids interested in gaming like D&D, GammeWorld, etc.
Does some awesome things:
* interaction with your kids not electronic based
* teaches critical thinking and cost benefit analysis
* teaches ways and means
* teaches map reading
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Agree completely.... I might add that, before smart phones, people had these electronic address books that were practically pointless, for example. Nowadays the phone is your address book - so yes, things evolve, but it was still during the big push to paperless that people started using them, and it just made things less convenient and take longer to look someone up. Now you tell your phone "call Joe" and it just does it - great. But some things are still just easier on paper, especially when taking notes and being able to diagram and annotate and draw arrows between parts...
Stupid sexy Flanders.
GammaWorld... /sigh
Does not teach:
* spelling
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
We'll have paperless offices soon after paperless toilets catch on.
TSIA.
Since I need to add more to satisfy the /. posting god, my point is that
1) paper is portable and readable in all circumstances. I don't need to fire up a reader, connect to wifi, turn on 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 estorage and edoc formats means that even if I HAVE the file, i might not be able to read/open it. Shit, 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, edocs are easier to fake, generally.
There are a host of things that paper isn't: searchable, stored effortlessly taking no space, easily (instantly) sent to someone else not present, backed up in case of loss, there are probably a ton of others. But the fact is that for what paper does, and what's important in a business/legal context, it's pretty irreplaceable.
1) I can carry over 10 years of corporate digital documents. Can't do that with paper.
2) The only reason that you can't open 25 year old documents is because you saved them in a proprietary format. I have documents older than that that I can still open. The formatting may be a bit off but I can still read them.
3) GPG or PGP if authenticity is important to you.
I'm not against paper but it's the decisions you make that create your limitations. Using undocumented or proprietary file formats is like printing on one ply TP. It's not made to last. It's a one time use.
People who are interested in keeping their digital collection for a long time make decisions that are not based on shiny but on needs. This will entail backups, conversions, storage and such, just like on paper, copies, fireproof safes, dry environments etc...
Digital may/will last longer if you use documented open standards and avoid DRM. It can and is being done today.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
Can't wait for the three seashells, eh?
TSIA.
Since I need to add more to satisfy the /. posting god, my point is that
1) paper is portable and readable in all circumstances. I don't need to fire up a reader, connect to wifi, turn on 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 estorage and edoc formats means that even if I HAVE the file, i might not be able to read/open it. Shit, 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, edocs are easier to fake, generally.
There are a host of things that paper isn't: searchable, stored effortlessly taking no space, easily (instantly) sent to someone else not present, backed up in case of loss, there are probably a ton of others. But the fact is that for what paper does, and what's important in a business/legal context, it's pretty irreplaceable.
1) This is really only an issue if you're out of range of WiFi and Cellular. Who turns off their computer anyway?
2) That's great for documents that are relevant a year after they were printed, but most documents probably become irrelevant within days of being printed.
3) That's a minus for most documents and use cases.
I think the main reason why paper is still widely used is that UI:s aren't good enough, software and hardware.
The one thing I still need paper for on a daily basis is for scribbling out throwaway notes, diagrams, drawings, etc. Maybe an iPad Pro or a Surface 4 pro could do the job hardware wise, but I doubt that the software is good enough yet.
Wait until you do business with any government agency, have a QA program, or get audited by other companies. You need a paper trail.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I'm an engineer, so I print schematics, refer to them and mark them up during debug. And a lot of other stuff. However, I'm happy to do stuff digitally when I can make it work.
But my company's business software? Not so much. I'm required to print every expense report, tape the corresponding receipts to it, sign it and put it in an IN basket. Not by my company, but by their tax accountants (and, ultimately, the IRS), who insist on paper.
Then, there are Purchase Orders. We have a digital way of entering these, as with the expense reports. But, the company wants signed hard copies. So, I fill it out online, then print a copy and sign it, put it in the IN basket. Another minor detail: the software we use ("Vision") is so clunky, that there's no practical way to digitally attach a copy of the online order form to the purchase order. And I'm sure as heck not going to retype every line of the order into the purchase order system. So, I order online, print the acknowledgement and staple it to the back of the PO form I have to hand in.
It's not that we couldn't go all paperless, it's that our business processes and regulation won't let us.
We about as ready for a paperless office as we are a paperless restroom. Both are technologically feasible, but to adequately handle all use cases is very difficult.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
It is quite doable but some significant things have to happen.
1. Open standard for e-documents. PDF doesn't cut it. And there has to be an easy way to create them, something like Markdown but better.
2. Ubiquitous storage. Basically cloud storage has to become something like a shared social distributed system that all have access to.
3. E-Readers have to be cheap, light, fast and have long battery life -- and standardized like a PC so many companies can provide them.
:T:R:A:N:S:
Sadly the modern RPGs have mostly forked into storytelling games and combat simulators. Neither of which teaches map reading, nor critical thinking and cost benefit analysis (beyond googling build optimization for the combat games).
I still love the old school though, and the success of Pathfinder shows that D&D 3x still has staying power for a system that can teach useful things, even if it's not as crazy open-eneded as really old school RPGs.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
8 in 10 and 80 out of 100 are different numbers. One is ten times larger.
What colour is the sky in your world? They are only different numbers the same way that 80% and 0.8 are different numbers, or that 3/4 is different from 75 out of 100.
I suppose if you are talking about survey responses 8 out of a total of 10 responses might indicate less confidence of how well you have captured the entire population's opinion compared to 80 out of 100 responses or 800 out of 1000 responses, but absent clearer wording "8 in 10" probably is indicating a ratio of respondants rather than an absolute number of responders.
Remember that shot in "Avatar" where a guy makes a vague gesture of waving a document from his desktop screen and towards a pad in his hand, and the document does exactly that? Those folks have finally replaced paper - not because of that one thing, but because it implies a document is always with you, effortlessly and seamlessly.
It goes much further than that. Paper documents you've printed off and carry with you can be *found* in a couple of seconds. During a meeting if you say, "I've got it right here"...and more than about four seconds elapse before you are showing that document or reading aloud from it, the conversation moves on past you. And it takes more than four seconds to find a document in a file system; less than four to shuffle through up to several pieces of paper (we can hold up to seven things in mental RAM, remember) and pull something out. So printing something serves as a proxy for making it more accessible.
At the moment, if you want to share that electronic document, you go through multiple steps, again breaking up a conversational flow - or it's impossible because your pad is Android and their's is iPad, or something. Or your meeting guest isn't on the corporate LAN. But if the guest brings six copies on paper, the sharing is accomplished in 15 seconds of passing-around-the-room.
Most printing I saw in the last few years related to meetings and passing out copies; or it was training materials. When you make a vague gesture waving the document on your pad to all the other pads in the room, and "it just works", a lot of modern printing needs will go away. When everything is searchable as quickly and quietly shuffling through some paper with half an eye while staying in a conversation, more will go away.
The problems will be solved one at a time. What people still haven't absorbed about computer use is the UI dictum that a four-second delay causes loss of focus and an eight-second delay starts the user off on different tasks - in a meeting, task #1 is to pay attention to the meeting, so the job of the pad simply doesn't get done and paper is brought next time. After we finally get sub-second, or at least less than 4-second solutions to all the things that paper is good at, use will finally decline. Sail had a long overlap with steam, too.
I co-own a small IT company with 7 people and the amount of paper we print out and receive has really diminished in the last 10 years.
We really do not print anything in terms of internal things as a lot of our work is at a customer location and involves several people over time so having things online and available to everyone at need has been a great help. Having it on paper would mean outdated versions and so on.
Of the about 60-70 invoices we send out monthly only one is on paper at their request.
In an average month we receive about 3-5 paper invoices, the rest are electronic.
Customer documentation and such are mostly electronic. We do have most of the contracts made on paper, though more and more of them are electronic.
Almost all of our communication with the government (taxes, import reports and such) are in electronic form. Only the municipality insists on sending the property tax on paper and the pension cover company sends the yearly report on paper. I do not think we receive anything else official routinely on paper, though there could be something I forget.
During this whole year so far I have printed out less than 30 pages(couple of contracts) and looked at less than that in total at papers from others in the company/directed at the company.
I must say that I definitely do not miss paper, all the folders full where you had to find something and the paper you were looking for was "always" miss-filed...
Uh, even that can be electronic
I have a "paperless office" and do 200+ small jobs a year. I still go through about 2 cases of Letter and Ledger paper (combined, for one engineer), plus a 500' roll of 36" wide bond a year. But I don't have any permanent hard copy storage. I've got probably 6 copies in digital format in various online and off-(or near-)line backups. It's far cheaper than storing the real stuff.
But no matter how I've tried to get rid of paper, when I throw on a set of coveralls to go into the 15" tall crawl space of a 150 year old theater to check existing structure, I'm going to take a pencil, paper, and $2 clipboard and leave my Surface in the truck. I regularly send digital copies of my prints to people, but if it's a small time contractor I'm going to send him at least three full-size printed copies, or else he'll make 8.5x11 reductions of my 24x36 prints on his 8 year old inkjet printer and the poor fool in the field won't be able to read any of it.
I also still far prefer pencil on paper for sketching to even the best tablets - and I've tried practically all of them. Some twice. I sketch on paper, scan it, then have it drafted into CAD. (yes, it's still much faster than drafting myself, and I'm a pretty good CAD jockey). I'm slowly switching over, but technical drawing on a tablet is just plain inefficient - there aren't enough of us to make it worth while as a market, so there are no good hand drafting programs.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
...is to take humans completely out of the workflow. As long as you have a meat-puppet touching any part of it, rest assured s/he will print something.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
1) In an office situation the same can be true of any IT solution. If your tablet is always close by and your WiFi is always on, and ... wtf do you mean by turn on a laptop? These devices are always on. In the wider sense what you say is true but in a controlled environment I can take my note and send it to you faster than you can come and get a sheet of paper from my desk.
2) A grand problem in the office is not the storage of paper, but the lack of storage for it. There are very few documents that need to be stored 10 or 100 years and if they do need to be stored like that then some cloud provider is not the place for it. I remember last time I changed jobs I filled up a large wheely-bin with worthless accumulated shit. The stuff I handed over suffered from a typical non-searchable poorly archived problem that is paper. My online stuff on the other hand was easier I just dragged and dropped everything to a folder and handed it to my successor. If he needs something he can search it. The same is true for many note-taking programs now. It's delusional to think that anything short of critical drawings or design plans will be worth anything in even 5 years let alone longer.
3) Not even many government agencies require originals anymore. Paper is just as easy to fake as any other document. The benefit of having a digital copy though is having a document management system with versioning. When everyone can always get a previous edit of a document, THAT is hard to fake. Paper is just easy.
But the fact is that for what paper does, and what's important in a business/legal context, it's pretty irreplaceable.
I work in a paperless office (engineering). My friend works in a paperless office (accounting). Sure there may be some fields that can't go paperless, but for most jobs paper can easily not only be replaced but you can gain major inefficiencies in doing so. However you can't half-arse it. Shoehorning an electronic system into a company that thrives on wet signatures and notepads and telling employees to make do with their existing hardware and software is never going to work. Going paperless needs to be thought through.
"The only reason that you can't open 25 year old documents is because you saved them in a proprietary format."
When I wrote that, I knew someone would try to dispute that. Sure, *.txt, woo.
Documents are about more than just text. I can't think of a common documentary format from 30 years ago that will support: ...and still be commonly readable today.
- embedded graphics
- tables
- complicated formatting - footnotes, etc.
For a piece of paper, it's not even a question.
-Styopa
This was how they did it at GE about ten years ago, so it might have gotten a little better. Fill in electronic requisition form on computer (yay paperless!). Print out. Sign. Scan to purchasing. Purchasing prints out. Verify order against printout from other database. Print out PO. Sign. Scan to Buyer. Buyer prints out and faxes to vendor. There were similar "paperless" processes for everything that used to have a single form that would physically go from department to department. Basically they tripled (or more) the amount of paper by doing the worst implementation of paperless imaginable.
There were some other striking examples. Project management tools went from being one plotted Gantt chart, posted to a wall, to a weekly email to all the team members, who invariably printed out and stapled to their cubes. Drafting redlines were the worst. You still had to print them out to get a good look at the drawing package (flipping from sheet to sheet in CAD took more computer than they were willing to buy us). But since you were using a shitty B/W printer, instead of manual redlines on paper, it was hard to see where the revisions were sometimes.
About the only use for them, really. And with fewer ports, there are less places poo can get stuck when you rinse them off. The 7 really was step forward, to be honest.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
We are attempting to solve a software problem with "hardware" (hard-copy). Yes, PDFs and the like, were the first step to a paperless office (which will never be 100% paperless). The next step is a standard for storage, lookup, organization, and the CIA-triad. We all complained about PDF being tied to a single company--which is a debate that must be had at every step--, but unfortunately, I don't see a way forward without another single entity developing the entire system. I imagine PDF will remain the 'paperless standard,' but as Adobe has yet to step up their game, another company (or OS org) is necessary to make the transformation.
Also if Adobe did it, they would probably screw everyone over (or attempt to) by integrating it into the CC platform w/ ongoing fees.
OMG facts!
I am somewhat disturbed by the lack of imagination my fellow /. readers have shown. It's not that difficult to think that within our lifetime, say in the next 50 years, we will have something that resembles paper but is in fact digital. It will be able to display any image or text transmitted to it either by sliding it through something or even wirelessly. It will not be a screen, thus require light to view it and it won't consume energy on a constant basis. One could edit it with the use of special pens.
In Capitalist US, the commerce controls the Government.
Paper still has some important properties that electronic forms cannot even begin to match. From the abysmal state of data security, reliability and long-term persistence and the still primitive user interface of modern computers, I deduce that we will not have a working and paper-equivalent "paperless office" in the next few decades. This is "too much too early", the mark of the amateur.
Note that I do not mind. I have high-quality paper, a nice printer and a whiteboard right on hand, and they serve just fine. The desires for a "paperless office" are misplaced. Even if it becomes a reality, it is not fundamentally superior. This is just another deluded fantasy by people that do not understand what technology can and cannot do.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Offices are a construct that defines "work time", the completely broken metric by which we allocate "wages". I have not had an office in more than 8 years, because I actually bill time to my employer (who is completely fine with that, because he rather has me being productive where and when I want than paying me for staring out the office window...), and that works to some degree. Of course, billing work-results would be better, but only very few people have the skills and integrity for that to work.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I work in government IT. The only paper products I have on my desk is a box of tissue and a notebook that I brought from home. There are no printers or copier machines. If we have an office supply cabinet, it's very well hidden.
I am a software engineer at a technology company and for me (and my peers) things are totally paperless. I was frankly surprised to see others saying how often they print things off.
I literally cannot remember the last time I printed something for distribution, or the last time someone submitted something to me on paper.
Well, I scan everything to PDF with OCR (ExactScan Pro) and find what I am looking for using the built-in Spotlight desktop search. And pretty PDFs for long term archiving, ... Most vendor's do not have good Mac support though, hence ExactScan for the scanner drivers and fast OCR.
Business since 1981. I remember in the mid 80's, the "paperwork reduction" act came along. My volumes went UP. Recently, 2010? the HIPAA law came long...volumes at one hospital went up about 8%. As long as we have LAWYERS & GOVERNMENT, there WILL be paperwork. Otherwise look at the countless millions that are paperwork shufflers that would be out of a job!
I only occasionally print something (only twice in the last 6 months). I have not bought a printed book in over two years. (I currently average about 3 ebooks per week.) I am the oldest software engineer in my group. I don't think it's age. More likely some people adjust to new methods and others don't.
Paper mills close down, or at least cut shifts and employees; paper company sells off large tracts of forest to developers; only decorative trees are left. I don't have any numbers to back this up, but could it be an unintended consequence?
Whoever wrote does not work with paper. Today's cheap paper and ink-jets FADE. And they fade BADLY. 10 years? I have stuff going back 10 years and it IS hard to read. 20? Will not happen.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"The only reason that you can't open 25 year old documents is because you saved them in a proprietary format."
When I wrote that, I knew someone would try to dispute that. Sure, *.txt, woo.
Documents are about more than just text. I can't think of a common documentary format from 30 years ago that will support: ...and still be commonly readable today.
- embedded graphics
- tables
- complicated formatting - footnotes, etc.
For a piece of paper, it's not even a question.
PS, EPS, PDF, TIFF, JPEG, TXT, CSV, CSV
Yes TIFF and JPEG are image formats and marking them up has the same effect as writing with a pen on a document totay.
We didn't have much choice since we are dealing in times where the technology was not fully developed they did/do a better job of representing the printed word better than most new formats of today (saving a print file for an Epson printer will not print on a Brother unless you use a supported format which is what I'm saying). Saving a PS will print on any PS capable printer. My other comment was down moderated which to me is stupid since I have files that are from the 80's and 90's and they can still be printed today as they were back then. The printer at the time had the font and once set it would print in that font.
Today we have those plus ODT, ODS, and many others that are completely published and open. If you care to keep the work you do and don't wish to rely on one specific organization for your documents inform yourself.
I am not saying that it's better than paper. I'm just saying that if you wanted you could and you can.
As for paper if it is not taken care of then it too disappears. I can no longer find my kids pictures with Santa from 10 years ago. Documents become brittle if not kept in a proper place. They discolor if they are not protected from the light. If the paper is not intended for archiving it may just fall apart.
Moderators can mod me down all they want it won't change the fact that I do have old digital and paper documents which I can still read today.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
The typical computer is the wrong size.
... I dunno ... thousands of books worth of documents stored on Hard Drives and backups. The ratio of paper documents to digital documents is enormous.
Why don't laptop screens come in a 9x12-ish format? Because they are built to accommodate the keyboard, not the screen.
Why do most people who own a rotatable desktop monitor still view it in landscape mode? Because all the software including the OS is built to work in the landscape form factor. Why are tablets popular? Because after a total rewrite of the OS and all apps, they actually work in a vertical orientation.
Paper is simply shaped the right way for reading. It is also more convenient to work with. I know the desktop metaphor works reasonably well, it just doesn't work as well as a real world stack of documents made of paper.
You can write on it. Being able to write on a computer screen has been available for 20 years, yet few people who have the capability actually use it, and very few people have the capability in the first place. The only exception seems to be graphic artists, and we all know they are not "normal" people.
The paperless office is a pipe dream, and always has been.
What digital devices are good for, however, is storage. There is no way any computer user would have had the same number of documents stored in their home or pocket if there was no digital device to hold it. The house would sink into the earth under the weight of it all.
I still use and buy books, I still use and work with paper documents. Yet I have
Virtual paperless Linux reality desktop*
*Powered by cold fusion.
The paperless office is not a dream... at least not a dream of mine.
I don't print things every day, but I'm glad to have that ability. Paper is portable, easy to annotate, and just plain useful. I see no reason why I should want to get rid of it.
For musicians (yes, an orchestra is an office), the electronic version is extremely primitive. Basically you need 25-30 inches foldable tablets with extremely high resolution (Full HDMI is not enough to display the pentagram correctly). And very high quality electronic pencils to take notes.
Also, it is not the same to draw on the screen that to do it on paper ... although this is improving constantly, we are not yet in the place we could say paper is over for artists.
And even for engineers. The napkin is the best tool to create innovative stuff ... ok, seriously talking, there are many drawings that can't be efficiently made without a piece of paper.
I hope that this will improve in the future, but only if the ones making the technology focus themselves in the hard issues and try to make the result affordable enough for children to use at school or for a 7 years old violin player to study his/her Suzuki Motto-Perpetuo.
You breezed right over "mellinial" on your way to "gammeworld".
> edocs are easier to fake
Unless they're cryptographically signed. Then I would trust them over any piece of paper, regardless of how many fancy watermarks or embossings from a notary it had.
Working from home, on telecons 5 hours a day, on an international project in banking.
Why would I print anything?
I can zoom and search on a big HDPI screen.
If the power goes off (or Skype for Business drops a call - which is 5 times a day) I cant really work and paper would not help
Everything is filed online, so you just have to get used to searching for docs in sharepoints, or mail folders.
If I go into the central office for client meetings, I dont even know where the printers are located
As long as government exists.
It depends on what you're doing. Can we move on?
Paper costs businesses a lot of money and they can't wait to be rid of it. People always said you'd never get rid of paper checks. Do any of you get your checks back from the bank anymore? What's that? You don't know what a check is? Well, it's this piece of paper...
2) Put paper in a file and come back in ten years and bugs & vermin have gotten to it, there's been a fire. Your paper no longer exists. I suppose acid free paper might help, but I've only heard about it, I've never seen it.
3) People have been editing paper for years. Look at all the trouble the banks go to secure checks and make sure people don't edit them.
I'm not really disputing your well-put points.
Of course there are things you can do to future-resist (I'm not going to say -proof) your electronic documents. This will certainly improve your chances of reading them.
And age-durability is NOT the only valuable factor in document handling (obviously), but it's kind of the point I'm focusing on.
Nevertheless, there are casually-hand-written notes that are >500 years old that are still perfectly readable, not having any particular preservation measures applied. I rather doubt that will be true for e-docs.
-Styopa
It's not just a millennial thing. I'm 52 (late 1964, right on the line of boomer/genx) and gave up printing everything out around 2006. Mostly I just got tired of the clutter (the same reason I started using cloth bags for groceries, I couldn't resist holding on to those old plastic bags just in case, then I had too many of them fail), and maybe computers got just better enough (both in speed and displays). About the only thing I would want to print out now, other than stuff to sign and give to other people, is a one or two page quick reference summary of stuff that doesn't have to be constantly updated that you can pin to a cubicle wall.
Hmmm, displays getting better? I suppose part of it was wide screens on laptops, in addition to employment changes for me, that corresponds roughly with the time that Apple went with Intel. I already had a wide-screen G4 PowerBook, so I was already getting used to doing things side-by-side. I've had my web browser at about 1000x1000 for years now, leaving the left 40% of the screen for other stuff. Sometimes I'll even divide that vertically in half or 30/70, so I can watch a video while doing other stuff. And if I'm playing a video game, it's usually running on a different computer (Macs still aren't great for gaming) while I take notes on the laptop. Why wait for a printout when your screen is big enough to put your documentation side-by-side with your code, or if you can view it on another display entirely?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
That's why the documents should live on a common server in another room, not on one guy's craptop in the machine shop. But keeping a common copy of changes at hand for multiple people to work on without sitting down at a computer to check on something, that's one of the few really good reasons to keep paper around.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Paper will be obsolete when I can get an ANSI B sized tablet (11x17) with 300dpi resolution and probably not even then.
It seems funny that the parchment written 'rolls' containing the early laws of England, in care of the top legal judge "The Master of the Rolls" are still readable (if you know early and middle English and Latin) whereas some recent legislation / tax records are 'lost' due to non-ability to real old computer records from 1950s. Paper degrades faster than parchment, so even paper offices have a finite life less than parchment for record keeping. I note government almost always wants hard copy (parchment or paper will do) with handwritten witnessed signatures for 'important stuff' (taxes, passports, driving licence applications etc). Fire appears to be only way to destroy these rolls.
Regards Eion MacDonald
If you are waiting for businesses to not use even a single shred of paper, the answer is probably never, and there is no good reason to. There are still people riding horses and in some cases, like mounted police, it makes practical sense compared to cars or motorcycles. If nothing else, we can't cleanse our behinds with LCD screens.
If the question is using huge amounts of paper for everyday business collaboration, that's out for at least the last decade. The holdouts are either bureaucratic government agencies or businesses where record keeping is such a tiny part of the whole operation that it's not worth worrying how it is done.