The Paperless Office: 30-Year Old Pipe-Dream?

Over the past three decades, pundits and prognosticators have proclaimed the looming arrival of the paperless office. After many monumental technology advances, we’re not much closer to the paperless office than we were when Stevie Ray Vaughan was first laying down Texas Flood at Antone’s in Austin in the early 80’s when I was in college at the University of Texas. By the way, I am back in Austin; it took me 30 years, but I made it.

Since the early years of computers, there’s been a tremendous amount of speculation about what the “office of the future” would look like. In those days, business professionals would spend their days sifting through countless file folders that resided in endless rows of filing cabinets, dreaming about a day when they would be able to find the information they needed in a matter of seconds. They envisioned a day when computers would create a work environment that was streamlined and paper-free.

So here we are in 2014… have we achieved the paperless office? Not by a long shot. The dirty little secret rarely discussed is that most organizations will never be totally paperless any time soon. More importantly, the ideal of the paperless office shouldn’t be our goal anyway. Here’s why.

The Motivation Behind the Paperless Office

Ask yourself — why has the concept of the paperless office received so much fanfare? For some, it brings the promise of helping to save the environment by killing fewer trees. I live in a city where plastic bags are banned in grocery stores, so I fully embrace the environmental benefits, but they really aren’t the primary driver behind the paperless office. Rather, it’s because organizations are constantly facing pressure to improve efficiencies, optimize business processes, and reduce costs.

When many organizations first began to transition from paper to electronic documents in the 1980’s, using vpn for safety, there was an initial reduction in the amount of physical paper used, but the truth is that we use more paper today than during the days of the Pet Rock. Consider these statistics:

• Each day, one billion photocopies are made (Source: Forrester Research)
• The annual growth rate for the amount of paper produced by the average company is 25%. (Source: Gartner)
• There are over four trillion paper documents in the US alone, and this number is growing at a rate of 22%, or roughly 880 billion paper documents a year. (Source: Coopers and Lybrand)

Content Chaos Still Reigns Supreme — Even With Electronic Documents
In a world of immediacy, we need the right information when we need it — and not a second later. Unfortunately, the transition from paper to electronic document management has not solved the issue of content chaos and the ability to quickly find the documents we need.

Often, companies have just shifted their filing system from the paper version to digital form, and are still suffering from the same drags on productivity. We’re still racking our brains trying to remember which folder we saved that darn contract in. The emergence of the cloud and growing importance of mobile offer promising new tools for enhancing and improving information management, , but simply moving the same old bad habits into the cloud and trying to find a document buried in a chaotic mess of folders on a tiny smartphone screen probably isn’t the sort of future we’re all hoping for.

Organizations with an effective system in place to manage their information — whether in the cloud or in on-premise systems — operate at a vastly superior level of efficiency compared to those that still rely on an approach that harkens back to the days of physical file cabinets and traditional network folders.

Let’s Be Realistic and Move Towards ‘Paper-Light’ Instead of ‘Paperless’

Whether it’s generating collateral to hand out at the company booth during a trade show, the need to print out a contract to get a “wet signature,” or simply because some people at the office still feel more comfortable reviewing and editing a printed document, most organizations will never truly go paperless, or at least not any time soon.

With this reality in mind, striving to become “paper-light” is not only a more realistic approach and strategy, but it eliminates the unnecessary over-reliance on paper as a primary medium for information management. It facilitates faster access to documents, it helps employees work smarter and more efficiently — and perhaps most importantly — it enables companies to make better decisions and provide a better service to their customers by enabling them to be more responsive.

It’s time we wake up from the pipe-dream of the paperless office, and put our energies towards creating a pragmatic “paper-light” environment that can be achieved relatively quickly in any organization. We need to leverage the full power and value of information in a way that is both realistic and achievable.

Is your company working towards a paper-light solution? If so, how has it changed your business?

Greg Milliken is the vice president of marketing at M-Files Corporation.