We’re making a concerted effort at CCSC to be more considerate of the environment but when Tracey Dean, Chief Financial Officer stated to me that we would have a “paperless office” in 12 months, although supporting the initiative wholeheartedly, I wondered how we were going to achieve this given that no company to my knowledge has succeeded in doing so.
Since the introduction of computers, there’s been a lot of speculation about what the “office of the future” would look like. The hope was that computers would create a work environment that was streamlined and paper-free.
Businesses used to have employees (and probably still do to some extent) who spent their days filing countless documents into folders, stored in endless rows of filing cabinets, dreaming about a day when they would be able to push a button and find the information they needed, in a matter of seconds.
So here we are in 2016 … have we achieved the paperless office? Well, not really.
When companies first started transitioning from paper to electronic documents in the 1980’s, there was an initial reduction in the amount of paper used, but the sad truth is that we use more paper today than ever before. Check out some of these stats:
- Each day, one billion photocopies are made (Source: Forrester Research)
- The growth rate per annum for the amount of paper produced by the average company is 25 per cent. (Source: Gartner)
- There are over four trillion paper documents in the US alone, and this number is growing at a rate of 22 per cent, or roughly 880 billion paper documents a year. (Source: Coopers and Lybrand)
It seems that shifting filing systems from paper to digital form hasn’t changed much in terms of productivity. We appear to have simply moved the problem to the digital world and these days spend our time racking our brains trying to remember which folder we saved that document in.
The emergence of the “cloud” and mobile devices offered new tools to potentially improve information management, however, trying to find a document buried in a whole bunch of folders on a tiny smartphone screen probably isn’t the sort of future we’re all hoping for.
So, what are our chances of becoming ‘paperless’ in 12 months? We are open to suggestions.
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