For as long as personal computers have been around the paperless office one of the holy grails of the IT industry.
Paper is messy, difficult to file or store and cruel to the environment. So being able to move and save information electronically made sense.
Despite the promises of the last twenty years, the quest for the paperless office seemed lost.
While the networked PC gave us the ability to get rid of paper, its advanced word processing functions and graphic capabilities along with the data explosion of email tempted us into generating more paper.
To compound the problem, over the last thirty years paper manufacturers found cheaper ways to make their product which meant the price of paper dropped dramatically just as we found more ways to use it.
So rather than delivering on the promise of eliminating paper, computers generated more than ever before.
Just as it seemed all was lost in IT’s War On Paper, the tablet computer came along. Coupled with cloud computing services and accessible fast wireless Internet, suddenly it appears we might just be on the verge on delivering on those promises of the last twenty years.
At a suburban football game I saw this first hand as I watched the ground officials electronically filing match information with their league.
“This used to be a pile of paperwork that used to take until Tuesday to be filed and collated” the ground manager told me, “today it’s done within half an hour of the game ending with almost no paper involved.”
For amateur sports clubs, money isn’t so much the problem as time. There simply are never enough volunteers to meet the workload of getting a team on field.
This is true with almost any community based organisation – from volunteer firefighters to community kindergartens organisers struggle with rosters and finding helpers.
In business the same resource constraints exist except we know we can fix these problems by paying a worker to do it. The problem there is few businesses have unlimited funds to employ filing clerks and form fillers to handle the paperwork.
By killing paper in the office, we’re making business and the economy more efficient. We’re about to deliver on that promise.
Bill Gates once wrote that in the short term we overpromise what technology can deliver while in the long term we underestimate its effects.
This is true of the paperless office – now that promise is being delivered the effects on business and government will be profound.
Is your business prepared for these changes?