The paperless office is no longer being held back by technical challenges. Everything you need to “go paperless” exists. The current barriers are cultural and process issues more than anything technical. In this article, we are going to look at ten of the common myths about going paperless.
1. Technology isn’t ready for a paperless office
The components of a paperless office are readily available and fairly inexpensive. The technology is readily available not only to scan in your existing paper, but to eliminate the creation of new paper through better workflow tools. While the technology for going paperless is readily available, the rate of adoption for these tools and this system is quite low.
In particular, tools like digital signatures and encryption could revolutionize the way we do business and these tools are accessible today. However, they are only useful if a large number of people use them. Think of the usefulness of a fax machine before they were commonly used. A fax machine is only useful if a number of people you want to communicate with also have fax machines. Digital signatures and encryption work in a similar way. You need both sides of the communication to be adept with using the tools.
2. Going paperless is “All or Nothing”
The ideal situation would be for the entire world to go paperless and start using electronic data interchange for doing business. That isn’t going to happen any time soon. You don’t have to convert everything over to be paper free to get some benefits from using less paper. Identify the places where you will get the best return on your investment and start there. Here are some examples:
- A maintenance department that handles written work order may get great return on their investment by moving the work order process from paper to a system that uses the web and email to assign and track work orders.
- A community college could replace their paper enrollment forms with a PDF. When future students fill it out and submit it, the information is transmitted directly to the school’s database. This saves the paper and the expense of having someone type in everything again.
- You can save on paper storage area in your home office by switching to electronic statements from your bank and storing those in some type of digital filing system.
- If you need to frequently exchange signed documents with a small group of people, consider going to a digital signature solution. (Using PKI or something like Echosign.) It may take just a bit to get everyone on board, but it can save you a tremendous amount of time and make your business function more efficiently.
If you are thinking about trying to go paperless, you will probably be waiting on the rest of the world instead of the other way around. Pick the parts that give you the biggest advantage and don’t worry about the parts where you still need paper to interface with other outside entities.
3. Paperless is less secure
When you send something through the mail, it gets handed from person to person until it finally sits outside of your house in a box by the road for a few hours; then you come get it and take it inside. How secure is that? On the other hand, a paperless workflow that uses proper encryption and digital signatures is very secure and is recognized by the government just like a physical signature.
The real thing holding us back is the fact that many businesses don’t understand or support a lot of the technology needed to make paperless workflow a possibility. Even those that do face the problem of customers who don’t have the necessary knowledge or setup to sign and encrypt documents.
Paperless is more secure than paper, even when you use inexpensive, commonly available technology; however, most people haven’t taken the time to understand how these technologies work. (If you want to change that, take a look at our article on digital signatures and encryption.)
4. Scanners are the most important part of going paperless
Scanners are usually the most important part if you just want to have paperless storage. If you really want to go paperless, scanners are just a stop-gap measure that you use to interface with other entities that are still using paper. The most important part of going paperless is probably going to be your digital signature and encryption tools.
Scanners show you where the problems are with your paperless system. If you have to put something in the scanner, it probably should have been given to you electronically in the first place.
5. Reading on a monitor is too hard
Reading on a lot of monitors is about like trying to read a novel printed on business cards. Either the text is so big that you can only see a few words at a time, or the text is so small that it strains your eyes. A good monitor makes it easy to read documents. There still may be cases where you need to print something off, but at the very least, a good monitor can make it easy to scan a 100-page document and locate the 3 or 4 pages you need to print.
Even if you can’t switch to a better monitor, you can often improve your ability to read documents by turning the monitor on its side so it matches the orientation of the paper you are using. Take a look at this monitor orientation illustration for an example.
6. Going paperless is good for the environment
Going paperless only helps the environment if you produce less paper. If you simply scan and discard all of your incoming paper, you really haven’t changed anything environmentally. To help save on paper, you have to use processes that reduce the amount of paper consumed—not just how much you store. Here are several ways that you can reduce the amount of paper that you use:
- Electronic forms. If your business uses forms, look for ways to let people fill them out electronically. This can be done through a website or by creating PDFs that have form fields built into them. Not only do these types of solutions save paper, they also help make your workflow more efficient because data doesn’t have to be re-keyed into the computer.
- Cancel magazines and junk mail. Get off the mailing lists you never intend to purchase from. If you are just going to throw it in the trash, it is worth calling in to cancel it. Not only does it reduce the amount of paper being produced, but it means less clutter for you to deal with.
- Use electronic signatures. Much of the paperwork we consume and generate has to be on paper for people to sign. By getting an electronic signature for yourself and encouraging the people you do business with to accept and use electronic signatures, you can cut out this source of paper.
- Good monitors. One of the best ways to keep people from printing out paper is to give them a good monitor so that they can read documents on their screen.
- Central printers. Instead of giving every computer a printer, get one or two heavy duty machines and put them in a central place. This saves on the cost per page printed because you are printing on machines that are made for higher volume. It also helps keep people from printing off things they don’t really need. It is amazing how amounts of pages printed are reduced if people will have to walk 30 feet to pick it up.
7. Going paperless is too expensive
The cost of the equipment to make a small office paperless has come down drastically. Good flat bed scanners can be had for less than $75. High quality sheet fed scanners that scan both sides at once cost in the $300-to $400 range. Many people have access to a high speed copier/scanner at work.
Often the most expensive part of a paperless setup is a good quality monitor, but many people already have a good monitor or are looking to upgrade for non-paperless reasons. Most people can create a very good paperless home office environment for less than $1000. In many cases, the cost is significantly lower. Most people already have a good percentage of the components they need and it is just a matter of using them.
8. Paper is safer than digital
If you have a poor back-up strategy, this might be true. Hard drives all eventually fail. If you have all of your data on one hard drive that goes bad and don’t store it anywhere else, then paper is definitely safer. However, if your hard drive is properly backed up with off-site storage, it becomes much safer than paper. Simple back-up solutions like Apple’s Time Machine and cloud storage backup like Jungle Disk and DropBox make it easy to get enterprise-level backup redundancy at a very low cost.
Physical paper can burn and be stolen. Digital information backed up in multiple locations is protected from pretty much any scenario that can cause the loss of paper data. The biggest threat to properly backed up data is that it might be stored in a file format that goes out of use. By sticking to standardized formats, you can most likely avoid this problem.
9. Digital formats are all equivalent
What you can do with a digital document is very dependent upon the format that it is stored in. A TIFF image of a page of text is pretty useless. Pretty much all it allows you to do is print it out and view it on the screen. On the other hand, a properly created (or converted) PDF document will allow you to search for text, copy and paste, reorder pages, integrate in a workflow, go through an approval process, mark up without damaging the original document, etc.
Make sure that you understand the benefits and drawbacks of each format—particularly if you are trying to use something other than a PDF. Also make sure that you understand how to use the format that you choose. Many of the capabilities are only available when documents are created in a particular manner. For example, a text document created incorrectly as a PDF is simply an image, so it functions just like a TIFF without any of the text-based search or manipulations features.
10. Going paperless will save time
Simply scanning in documents will not save you any time. The point of going paperless isn’t just to create digital copies of everything. The goal is to create a workflow that is more efficient than what you’d get with a paper-based system. Just throwing a bunch of scanned documents into a computer folder is going to waste a lot of time. In fact, it will probably cost you much more time than dealing with a marginally functional paper-based filing system.
Here are some of the things to consider if you want to actually save time with a paperless setup:
- Optical Character Recognition – One of the biggest time savers is your ability to search through documents. However, you can only do this on documents that have been converted using OCR or that were created with the text embedded in the first place.
- Organization – Rarely do you want just a big pile of documents on the computer. You need to have some system of organization. There are a number of ways to do this, but you have to design a system based on how you will look for the document in the future. Ask yourself “how will I find this?” instead of “where should I put it?”.
- Workflow – Think about the types of things you normally need to do with documents. Most people need the ability to:
- Fax – Send the document to someone else using a fax machine. I use Ring Central for this functionality.
- Annotate – Mark up the document with notes. You may also want a system to share and obtain comments and annotations from/with others.
- Sign – Add your signature to a document.
- Email – Send the document to someone via email.
- Sorting – You will want a simple way to sort incoming documents. Check out our video of DevonThink’s semi-automatic classification feature.
Great write up. I help enterprise operations utilize document management and workflow and you have laid out the concepts clearly. The only thing people need to watch out for is making things too complicated. Some things do really exist better as paper… which is subsequently captured, classified, and archived for digital retrieval. An example being delivery tickets for asphalt trucks building roads. Thanks for putting this together. Hopefully folks will take your advice, especially the backup strategy.
Andy Morrison, CDIA
NMS Imaging, Inc.
You’re not kidding about the time taken to scan old documents. I spent days scanning in old newspaper clippings – I’m a old-school print journalist attempting to reinvent myself as a paperless journalist.
But there’s another reason to do this. I had the equivalent of seven filing cabinets of paper – that’s a huge physical burden. Scanning my old clips had brought me down to around 1 cabinet of essential paper. I need one fewer rooms in my home – that’s an enormous saving.
I use to work for a hospital that put in a paperless medical record system based on several million dollars of savings. They were building a new building and were trying to avoid building thousands of square feet for medical records storage.
If you have a lot to scan, I’d hire a highschool or college student to do it for you. You can usually find someone good for not much money and it helps you knock a lot of scanning out very quickly.
What a wonderful article. I printed a copy and filed it for future reference!
Be sure to print multiple copies so you can keep it filed under various different terms. :)
What follows are my comments:
1. Technology isn’t ready for a paperless office: Technology is ready, but are we? The average user (but also the high end one) isn’t. Changing from paper to digital isn’t at all a problem of technology: is mainly a problem of habit.
2. Going paperless is “All or Nothing”: True what is said. Is not an “all in” affair, but a step by step go through, with positive impacts also if made in minimum part
3. Paperless is less secure: Did someone remember “social engineering”? We leave more risky and interceptable traces in paper than in electronic format. The only point is that our feeling of control on paper is stronger.
4. Scanners are the most important part of going paperless: Not at all. The most important thing is how securely and fast we can store and access the datas.
5. Reading on a monitor is too hard: is hard but manageable. On pure feeling point of view, you can like or not reading something on monitors (and in my case there are some kind of documents I appreciate and other that I don’t : for example books)
6. Going paperless is good for the environment: I’m not sure of the balance, since less paper means more eletronic, more power used and definitely more CO2 in the air
7. Going paperless is too expensive: Yes it is, or at least it is expensive if you seek for high end solutions.
8. Paper is safer than digital: Not at all, but in some cases it is, because of some institutions need to have original paper docs.
9. Digital formats are all equivalent: no they aren’t.
10. Going paperless will save time: depends a lot on instruments but also on personal attitude (e.g. since Windiws CE I tried many times to go digital with a PDA. Never succeeded. Then came the IPhone… :-) )
On your #6 comment: I think that if the storage medium is static in some way, only drawing power when the data is accessed, e..g, flash memory, then it can be environmentally friendly; What if all data is constantly using energy, e.g., hard-drives spin no matter what single piece of data is accessed, then the longer the data is stored, the more environmentally damaging it becomes; whereas paper simply sits in storage until demanded.
I would love to see some study of energy use per data access/storage/calls.
You’d have to also consider how much energy goes into cutting down a tree, moving it around, chopping it up, turning it into paper and then getting that paper to your printer. Also all of the energy and carbon from creating printers that wouldn’t be needed if everyone went paperless. It gets complicated very quickly.
I don’t think flash is going to be the most environmental friendly way to store large amounts of information for quite a while. Many hard drives power down when not in use. They probably draw a very small amount of energy in this mode, but I think it is minimal. When a read or write request comes in, they power back up again. Most operating systems will let you change the settings under the power management.
I am not ready to make a judgment either way, I am just suggesting that it is not as clear-cut an issue as many would like to think it is. There should be more research into the topic because I don’t think cutting trees bad – electrons good.
You point out that all the energy to cut, process, and haul wood would have to be taken into account, which is true; but you equally would have to consider the energy use and environmental impacts of all the materials needed to make all the electronics that are constantly updated and upgraded (people are constantly upgrading and updating laptops and iphones, etc.), including all the toxic and rare materials that have to be brought together from around the globe in order to make the laptop, ipod, ipad, hard-drive, flash-drive, etc. just for people to feel smug because of the shiny surfaces and images.
Just as a thought; I don’t know that the amount of energy exerted to make all the non-electronic information medium used in the time that the, e.g., iPad1 will be upgraded to the iPad2, would consume the same amount of energy and have the negative environmental and social impact (NIMBY) that making the iPad1 – with all the globally sourced toxic materials – would. This is even less clear when you consider that non-electronic medium, e.g., books, would end up being traded or resold at second-hand book-stores.
Don’t think I am a Luddite, I am simply not one to drink the cool-aid just because it sounds like what I want to hear. America has a horrid habit of simply justifying things because they fit our collective desired image; I am simply suggesting that in the absence of clear, unbiased evaluation it should not be stated that one is better than the other.
I also don’t know if flash is that answer, probably isn’t, but the fact of the matter is that paper does not have to be charged, nor does it use energy to access the information on a page (if the page is local). All of this has to be weighed against the benefits of the massive, unimaginable access to information and resources that electronics and the internet allow, but, again, to me, when considering ALL aspects, the issue is no where near clear cut.
It sounds like you are assuming that if people use paper, they will not buy a computer or hard drives. I doubt if this is the case. Chances are they are going to buy 95% of what they need for a paperless setup even if they are still printing out huge volumes of paper all the time.
Actually, what I am assuming is that declaring that using electronic vs. non-electronic methods of information storage is somehow superior, is inherently flawed in the absence of thorough investigation and study. You are right, on an individual level things are going to be different, and a person may buy that computer, but, for example, will I buy the additional external hard-drives for local redundant and off-site backup on top of the online back-up if I am storing information statically in documentation. The external hard-drives will need replacing to prevent failure, and they are made of harmful and toxic chemicals and materials that might take far more resources to fabricate into a finalized hard-drive.
I don’t have the answer, but i strongly get the sense that people just jump to conclusions that somehow electronic storage is inherently better.
I thought of the discussion regarding the toxicity of the materials used in creating technology and the environmental and social impact of mining them vs the impact of using paper when I saw this.
http://xkcd.com/750/
That’s a great cartoon. Thanks for sharing it!
Regarding the environmental and social costs of electronics – the following does a good job at raising awareness. It is an issue that has frustrated me about our culture; our environmentalism and humanitarianism is about as deep as a sheet of paper is thick and mostly consists of style and design elements without any substance. Anyway, here is the post on FastCompany on the issue of the social costs of electronics:
http://www.fastcompany.com/1664584/im-a-mac-im-a-pc-i-fuel-atrocities-in-the-congo
Good article. TIFFs can be searched too though if Optical Character Recognition has been performed.
Good to know. I didn’t know that TIFFs could contain a text layer.
It is possible to do this retrospectively? I have OmniPage 16 installed.
It is probably possible. I’d look to see if there is a batch OCR process or something.
Good comments: I have been working on creation of a paperless enviroment or it was our original driver. As noted; scanning is an intergal part of placing documents into our UDS system. We created an internal Web site that is a “file room” or repository for these documents. We not only collect .tiff’s but allow any Microsoft Office document to be added including emails. PDF’s are also part of the collectoion. When we built the site, we collect information about the type of documents that the group/department uses or needs to store. We use indexes that are representative of the doc’s to store in a MS Sequel database. The site(s) itself has a row of text boxes across the top which the user can use to query for the needed document. One such text box we create is a “Doc Type” dropdown list that further divideds the documents into groups that are relevent. Additional text boxes are “date created”, and date updated which allow the use of (=, >,<) to further discriminate between documents. We add additional text boxes that may be helpful to further discriminate between documents. Forget the Folder sub Folder concept and think of one big bucket which is what the user sees. It may sound difficult to find a specific record but it is actually easy. Security: you have to be added as a user of the site before you will be able to see or find the site. Does it work? Yes it works. We had a very large storage area where we kept our paper files for our Policy depart. If you need a doc from one of these files, you need to interoffice mail a request for the document. Someone pulled the file, made a copy of the document, and mailed it back to you. We current have over 3 million documents in our Policy site and 1500 users. They can now easily find a document within seconds. Now. you do not need to have a accountant do a study on ROI to realize that we are saving tons of money. We currently have 24 sites set up at Ohio Workers' Comp.
I started working for myself last year and switched over to everything virtual that I could. So instead of a handset phone, I’ve got a VoIP service that routes everything to my cell, I don’t need a printer, and I use my laptop for everything else. Instead of a fax machine I’m using something like this internet fax.
Great article showing people how to work outside the box and reduce their carbon footprint at the same time. Thanks for the tips.
I setup a pdf printer on my workstation and “print” pdfs right to my kindle dx and can all but throw my printer in the trash. I keep tons of technical documentation and meeting notes on my kindle and can retrieve them at any time. The battery life is also amazing.