The paperless office remains elusive

While I was at AIIM this week, I participated in a round-table discussion sponsored by Xerox with a theme on the realities of the paperless office. The forum included journalists, analysts and Xerox customers. It was hosted by John Gonzalez, director of product management for Xerox’s DocuShare [1] Business Unit.

The discussion, as I saw it, broke down into two distinct areas: Content coming from outside the company and content generated inside the firewall. Various participants pointed out the difficulty of imposing a paperless workflow on the outside world. Insurance companies have to process paper accident reports, for example. You can't force a municipality to comply (the exception of course, is if it was legally required, as is happening now with electronic health records). Mom and pop shops are not going to stop faxing reports or mailing invoices and so forth. There are simply too many variables.

It's easier, at least in theory, to impose some paperless rules in house. You can force workflows online, but at least one speaker pointed out that people often like their hard copies. Another participant admitted that she preferred to copy edit a hard copy because she could more easily get the big picture of the flow of the document. Perhaps it's generational and over time as a new generation of workers comes on board we will see more comfort with electronic document immersion.

One thing that struck me, was that digitizing the paper in our work lives creates its own set of problems, chiefly around finding good software to move the digital stuff around, manage it and so forth (which of course is CMS's sweet spot), but it also presents a storage issue and customers need to be aware of the growing demand they will have for storage solutions as they move paper online.

The fact is that as far as we've come in terms of digital tools and workflows, for the foreseeable future, there is no getting around the idea that there will be at least some paper (and in some cases, lots of paper) in the mix.