What is the promise of the paperless office? Well, a paperless office could save trees, because paper is made from trees. It could also make office workers fat as they don’t have to move from their workstations to get paper documents. From the company’s viewpoint, a paperless office could save expensive office space needed for filing cabinets, and the cost the filing cabinets, paper folders and the salaries of an army of filing clerks.

More importantly, however, a paperless office could speed up business processes. Business processes typically involve considerable movement of documents. While paper documents move at irritatingly slow speeds, electronic documents in a paperless office move at electronic speeds, i.e. near the speed of light.

In practice, the documents are stored in a central server that can be accessed from workstations connected to the network. Programs can trigger alerts drawing the attention of concerned persons to pending documents. With quick access to documents and the use of such alerts, business processes can move far more speedily compared to a paper environment.

The Mirage of a Paperless Office

Paper is not going to disappear from offices, however. There are several reasons for this.

• Some office workers might not be computer-literate or comfortable with computers even if they know how to use computers.
• For certain kinds of work that require a relaxed and/or thoughtful style of work, printed documents might be preferred to flickering computer screens. Examples include design prototyping of come kinds, serious study of a topic (that might involve adding comments in the margins) and such. It is not easy to match the visual interface provided by paper in such cases.
• Extremely confidential documents can leak out if they are stored on computer.
• Courts of law might not accept digital documents as evidence unless they are convinced that systems and practices are in place that prevent faking these documents, a comparatively easy process in a digital environment.

For these and other reasons, paper will continue to be used in offices. The completely paperless office is likely to remain a mirage.

Moving towards a Paperless Office

Though a completely paperless office might be mirage, it is possible to reduce the use of paper documents through certain practices. These include:

• Online capture of data where possible. POS terminals used in retail establishments are an example. So are handheld devices used in inhospitable environments such as offshore drilling platforms to record data that can be transmitted wirelessly to the office computers.
• Automated capture of data through the use of sensors that can count, read and measure. Barcode readers in warehouses, electronic counters monitoring production lines and temperature sensors in process plants are examples.
• Scanning paper documents at the point the paper documents arrive and using OCR and indexing software to transfer these into the electronic workflow.
• Implementing systems and practices to authenticate digital documents in a manner that would be acceptable to courts of law.

In an environment like the above, the generation of paper documents can be minimized and most of the remaining paper documents can be shredded after transfer into digital format.