Paperless office

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The paperless office is now considered to be a philosophy to work with minimal paper and convert all forms of documentation to a digital form. The ideal is driven by a number of motivators including productivity gains, costs savings, space saving, the need to share information and reduced environmental impact.

Paper based documents transformed to digital based documents

One key aspect of the paperless office philosophy is the conversion of paper documents, photos, engineering plans, microfiche and all the other paper based systems to digital documents. The technologies that may be used include

• scanners
• high speed scanners - used for scanning very large volumes of paper.
• book copiers - that take photos of large books and manuscripts.
• wide format scanners - for scanning engineering drawings
• photo scanners
• negative scanners
• microfiche scanner - used to convert microfiche to digital documents.
• digitization of postal mail - online access of scanned contents
• Fax to PDF conversion - made possible by companies

Each of the technologies uses software that converts the raster formats into other forms depending on need. Generally, they involve some form of compression technology that produces smaller raster images or the use of Optical character recognition, or OCR, to convert the document to text. A combination of OCR and raster is used to enable search ability while maintaining the original form of the document. An issue faced by those wishing to take the paperless philosophy to the limit has been copyright laws. These laws restrict the transfer of documents protected by copyright from one medium to another, such as converting books to electronic format. An important step in the paper-to-digital conversion is the need to label and catalog the scanned documents. Such labeling allows the scanned documents to be searched. Some technologies have been developed to do this, but generally involves either human cataloging or automated indexing on the OCR document. However, scanners and software continue to improve, with small, portable scanners that are able to scan doubled-sided A4 documents at around 30-35ppm to a raster format (typically tiff fax 4 or pdf).

Issue in keeping documents digital

• Business procedures and/or government regulations. These often slow the adoption of exclusively electronic documents.
• The target readers' ability to receive and read the digital format.
• The longevity of digital documents. Will they still be accessible to computer systems of the future?

Comparison of paperless vs traditional office philosophy

A traditional office consisted a paper-based filing systems, which may have included filing cabinets, folders, shelves, compactus's, microfiche systems, and drawing cabinets, all of which take up considerable space, requiring maintenance and equipment. Meanwhile, a paperless office could simply consist of a desk, chair, computer (with a modest amount of local or network storage), scanner and printer, and the user could store all the information in digital form.

Historical perspective

The paperless office was a publicist's slogan, meant to describe the office of the future. The basic idea was that office automation would make paper redundant for routine tasks such as record-keeping and bookkeeping. The idea came to prominence with the introduction of the personal computer. While the prediction of a PC on every desk was remarkably prescient, the 'paperless office' was less prophetic. Improvements in printers and photocopiers have made it much easier to produce documents in bulk, word-processing has deskilled secretarial work involved in writing those documents, and paper proliferates. Paperless office is also a metaphor for the touting of new technology in terms of 'modernity' rather than its actual suitability to purpose. An early prediction of the paperless office was made in a Business Week article in 1975.

See also

• Electronic office
• Springcm

References

• "The Office of the Future" in Business Week, no. 2387, 30 June 1975, pp 48-70.
• The Elusive Paperless Office -- article on Jehovah's Witnesses Official Web Site
• Rethinking Paperless: Efficient Alternatives For The Not-So-Paperless Office -- ECM Connection, October 15, 2007
• The Saga of the paperless office -- articles on a chiropractor's struggle to make his office paperless
• Sellen, A. J. and R. H. Harper: The Myth of the Paperless Office. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2003.
• Getting Started on the Paperless Office, Springcm Paperless Whitepaper, Chicago, IL USA, 2007.