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

It's pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the paperless office is pointless. Sometimes physical paper cannot be replaced, and the convenience cannot be matched.

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.

Re:Around the same time as the paperless bathroom

[H3lldr0p]

Look you just need to know how to use the shells. That's it.

And stop swearing at the auto-ticket machine. It's running out of slips to print on.

Yes. It will never happen.

[argStyopa]

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.

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.

Ignoring the clickbait headline.

[MrKrillls]

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*?

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).

Re:i'd settle for competent paper use

[networkBoy]

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.

This is a valid use case.
Proofing on paper is vastly different than proofing on the screen, especially if for something that is final output to paper.
You're not only looking at spelling, grammar, word choice, etc. you're looking at layout, font, flow, margining, and all the other things that go into it. Add to that the tactile response of a good pen...

Yes you could use a stylus and tablet... but it's not the same. Eye fatigue is higher with screens as well.
-nB

Not a dream, just the tech is only halfway

[rbrander]

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.