Paperless Office

[Professor Frink]

My company produces software for the accounting industry, and it allows users to store electronic images of everything that is in the system in addition to printing to paper. So if you create some tax returns, you can e-File them for the client, then make an electronic copy of them for storage. That way you don't have to send the IRS a paper copy, nor do you have to store a paper copy of the returns. Saves lots of paper.

I think this kind of product is what people think of with the paperles office. I also know some people who immediately print any email they get, which of course defeats the purpose. You're never going to get rid of paper, but you can do a lot to make it easy for people to avoid it if they want.

I think it was a Dilbert strip where the "paperless office" was causing a bathroom-related problem...

 

[Bikewer]

I'm a police officer, and it's not been that long since a number of our older guys were dragged kicking and screaming to the computer. (one even retired as a result!)

We use a Computer-Aided-Report-Processing software that is primitive compared to contemporary word processers. We print out copies of all reports, but there are security issues with police reports; you can't just send copies to involved parties via e-mail, for instance.
We also usually print copies of e-mails to read at roll calls.

I don't know how many reams of copy paper we use per month, but we're definitely not paperless!

 

[Michael Redman]

My experience is that technology causes the printing of a lot of documents that would never see the light of day if it took more effort than clicking "print" to produce. In the areas I've worked, people are not yet giving up printed copies of documents in favor of electronic files, but rather printing and keeping paper as backup. In legal matters, until document and signature authentication is standard and reliable, much paperwork still has to be printed, and because it’s so easy to create, little attention is paid to discretion or brevity.

In the legal field, word-processing has made small group and solo practice economically viable for a lot more lawyers. In the good old days, a solo practicing lawyer had to hire a secretary to help with all the paperwork. That also meant, of course, that the lawyer had to clear the employee compensation in addition to other overhead before they made any money. Now most lawyers do some or all of their own document creation, thanks to word processing and electronic forms. I know plenty of lawyers who don't have a secretary, or who share one among several attorneys. It's a good thing, too, because the cost of employees and glut of lawyers on the market has forced legal fees down to the point where few lawyers could afford to work solo or in small groups, or practice in less lucrative areas, or for less affluent clients if they had to pay much of a staff out of their earnings.

 

[patnray]

Patnray said:
So you'll have one document for every $1,000 spent? And each of those documents cost how much to create, circulate, approve, update, and archive?

~~ Paul

I'm not sure what your point is. These are the documents any large project produces: Drawings, detailed specifications, Invitations to Bid, Contract Awards, Contractor Invoices, Inspection Reports, Change Orders, etc. There is a cost in producing and processing documents in any project. In a manual, paper based system there would be a large staff needed to file the originals and then retrieve them and copy them each time someone needed to see them. In our system we have only 2 document clerks to enter, code, and file the originals.

There is also a cost in developing and maintaining the software, but everyone in the project can locate documents much more quickly than they could using paper copies. Much of the document production (such as discussions about change orders) is partly automated as well. A fully formatted response to a change request can be produced by entering just the text of the response, which is e-mailed to the contractor (and entered into the document system) without ever producing a paper document.

When there was a legal dispute over the awarding of one contract, we were able to provide every relevant document on a CD in less than a day. Imagine going into a room with several dozen file cabinets and asking for a copy of every document and e-mail about building #3 that mentions "partition anchors", as a hypothetical example, and you can appreciate the time and paper savings of this system.

Of course it is not paperless since users often print copies to take to meetings, but we include an ability to download the docs to handheld devices and CDs to try and minimize printing. Although we still go through paper by the ton, we use far less paper than we would without the database.

Edited to add details...

 

[Blondin]

I've got some 160K floppies from an Osborne that are unreadable after 20 years, even if I could find a working Osborne.

If only I'd known! I gave away 2 working Osbornes last summer.

(But I've still got a 300 Baud acoustic coupler)

 

[tedly]

If only I'd known! I gave away 2 working Osbornes last summer.

(But I've still got a 300 Baud acoustic coupler)

Thanks Blondin and Zep but....Losing Software this is the other part of the problem. The disks themselves are 20? years old, and the data is stored as N pole domains beside S pole domains and there's probably nothing there to read anymore.
Not that anyone else wants to read MY deathless prose.