Historical perspective
The paperless office was a publicist's slogan, meant to describe the office of the future. The basic idea was that office automation would make paper redundant for routine tasks such as record-keeping and bookkeeping. The idea came to prominence with the introduction of the personal computer. While the prediction of a PC on every desk was remarkably prescient, the 'paperless office' was less prophetic. Improvements in printers and photocopiers have made it much easier to produce documents in bulk, word-processing has deskilled secretarial work involved in writing those documents, and paper proliferates.
An early prediction of the paperless office was made in a Business Week article in 1975.[1]
Historical paper use
Contrary to the predictions of the paperless office, the introduction of computers increased paper use, with worldwide use of office paper more than doubling from 1980 to 2000.[2] This has been attributed to the increased ease of document production[2] – rather than needing to type a document up, one may easily print out multiple copies, email it to someone who then prints out a copy, print out a web page, and so forth. However, since about 2000, global use of office paper has leveled off and is now decreasing, which has been attributed to a generation shift,[2] younger people being less inclined to print out documents, and more inclined to read them on a screen.
Metaphor and philosophy
Paperless office is also a metaphor for the touting of new technology in terms of 'modernity' rather than its actual suitability to purpose. McIndoo; Todd (2009)"Paperless Office in Perspective A Document Management System for Today", pp. 5-11
The paperless office is now considered to be a philosophy to work with minimal paper and convert all forms of documentation to any digital form. The ideal is driven by a number of motivators including productivity gains, costs savings, space saving, the need to share information and reduced environmental impact.
Transforming paper-based documents to digital-based documents
One key aspect of the paperless office philosophy is the conversion of paper documents, photos, engineering plans, microfiche and all the other paper based systems to digital documents. The technologies that may be used include -
- Scanners
- High speed scanners - used for scanning very large volumes of paper.
- Book copiers - used for taking photos of large books and manuscripts.
- Wide format scanners - used for scanning engineering drawings.
- Photo scanners
- Negative scanners
- Microfiche scanner - used to convert microfiche to digital documents.
- Laserfiche convert microfiche to searchable and digital
- Digitization of postal mail - provides online access of scanned contents.
- Fax to PDF conversion
- Online post offices - outsourcing management of snail mail
- Multifunction printer
- Document management software and solutions
Each of the technologies uses software that converts the raster formats (bitmaps) into other forms depending on need. Generally, they involve some form of image compression technology that produces smaller raster images or the use of optical character recognition (OCR) to convert the document to text. A combination of OCR and raster is used to enable search ability while maintaining the original form of the document.
An issue faced by those wishing to take the paperless philosophy to the limit has been copyright laws. These laws restrict the transfer of documents protected by copyright from one medium to another, such as converting books to electronic format.
An important step in the paper-to-digital conversion is the need to label and catalog the scanned documents. Such labeling allows the scanned documents to be searched. Some technologies have been developed to do this, but generally involves either human cataloging or automated indexing on the OCR document.
However, scanners and software continue to improve, with small, portable scanners that are able to scan doubled-sided A4 documents at around 30-35ppm to a raster format (typically TIFF fax 4 or PDF).
Issues in keeping documents digital
- Business procedures and/or government regulations. These often slow the adoption of exclusively electronic documents.
- The target readers' ability to receive and read the digital format.
- The target readers' ability to manipulate, i.e. highlight, annotate, or edit data in a digital format.
- The longevity of digital documents. Will they still be accessible to computer systems of the future?
Paperless versus traditional office philosophy
A traditional office consisted of paper-based filing systems, which may have included filing cabinets, folders, shelves, compactuses, microfiche systems, and drawing cabinets, all of which take up considerable space, requiring maintenance and equipment.
Meanwhile, a paperless office could simply consist of a desk, chair, and computer (with a modest amount of local or network storage) and the user could use and store all the information in digital form, including speech recognition and speech synthesis.
Notes
References
- Sellen, Abigail J.; Harper, Richard H. R. (2001). The Myth of the Paperless Office. Cambridge, MA, USA: The MIT Press. ISBN 0 262 19464 3.
- Discusses limitations of the paperless office, and the valuable role paper can play for knowledge workers.
- Concept of paperless office versus actual cost saving strategies, historical review
See also
