Document Storage
The Future is paperless?
An early prediction of th
e paperless office came in a
Business Week article in 1975, describing the office of the future.
The idea
was that with the introduction of PCs on every desk, paper would become
redundant for routine
tasks such as record-keeping and book-keeping. Nearly 40
years later, technology has far exceeded our
expectations, with tablets, smartphones,
laptops and wifi, yet demand for paper is at an all-time high.
Finnish paper
provider FOEX predicts that the global market in 2012 could reach a record of
400m tons.
It seems that paper remains at the heart of our culture, despite all
the advances in technology.
Advocates of going paperless claim that it can save money, boost
productivity, save space, make
documentation and information sharing easier,
keep personal information more secure and help the
environment.
Many companies
have tried, but being genuinely paperless is an expensive thing to even attempt
to do.
The National Archives, the official archive of the UK government, have
predicted a cost of £295m to
reduce the number of boxes being produced in the
reading room by just 20%. For them, and for many
companies in today’s economic
climate where budgets are being stretched in all directions,
going paperless is
not the main concern, and will not see the required return on investment
that other
activities may provide. In short, it’s a question of priorities.
For historians and researchers, paper is still important and something that
they are keen to preserve.
The British Library is looking for ways to reduce
reliance on paper, and its newspaper library, which has
been built up over
three centuries and consists of 750m pages, is now being moved to digital.
However,
the originals are being secured and placed in storage. As a result of
this, the actual library will close.
Retaining important documents is not just imperative for historic purposes,
but many papers need to be
kept to meet legal requirements, with the retention
period varying from three months to permanently.
Microsoft advises companies
who want to become paperless, but admits that in practice this means ‘less
paper’.
Certainly there are savings to be made by switching some tasks to online,
such as e-invoicing, especially if the time
saved on paper-associated admin
tasks is included.
There seems to be no doubt of the benefits of reducing paper in the office,
but going completely paperless still
seems as far away as when it was first
predicted. Our love of paper shows no sign of abating.