The phrase "paper-free office" ought to be a cliché by now. After all, it's been with us for years. But it has remained, for most businesses, something to aspire to, rather than a reality.
There are signs, this New Year, that the status quo may be changing.
For one thing, we're all more paper-free than we used to be. As I scan the midmarket company where I'm sitting right now, I still hear printers, still see piles of paper, and Post-it notes, and even inter-office mail. But rows of filing cabinets are a thing of the past; communication takes place overwhelmingly by email and instant messenger, and non-confidential information is increasingly stored in the cloud.
Even so, estimates suggest that average office worker still "uses" as many as 10 thousand sheets of paper per year. Now, we all feel sorry for the trees, of course, but there are business imperatives to reduce the amount of paper generated and stored.
Welcome, then, the Paperless Coalition, a loose federation of enterprises that just launched #Paperless2013, a new push to go paper-free, both to help the environment and save time and money.
All the motives for reducing paper production and consumption make special sense for the midmarket. Nothing could be less agile than a business founded on warehouses of documentation. That much is obvious. But server huggers are with us always, and paper huggers too: The people who just won't entrust specific tasks to technology. But as Joseph Walla, CEO of Paperless 2013 sponsor HelloFax, says:
For the first time, it's easy to sign, fax, and store documents without ever printing a piece of paper. It's finally fast and simple to complete paperwork and expense reports, to manage accounting, pay bills, and invoice others. The paperless office is here--we just need to use it.
HelloFax is walking the walk: "Throw away your fax machine" is its unexpected motto. Paperless2013 is also supported by, among others, GoogleDrive and Fujitsu ScanSnap, each of which are heavily invested, of course, in the migration from paper to the web. Also involved, Manilla, the online bill and accounts organizer -- ironically, a company that derives its name from a hemp-based paper product.
What's holding businesses back from becoming genuinely paper-free? Here are my guesses:
Habit. We've always used paper for this; if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Document retention concerns. Whether for operating purposes or regulatory reasons, there are some files companies are just nervous about entrusting to the cloud.
Here's a depressingly bad reason: patent trolls seeking fees for using scanners.
That's my list, and it's not very impressive. At least document retention concerns have some legitimacy -- but that's a matter of ensuring that your digital storage is appropriately secure, with solid disaster recovery strategies. That's something that should be a priority in any case.
So how about it, midmarket? A 2013 with no paper -- none at all? I'll believe it when I see it.
Our whole ability to think depends a lot on our handwriting, that's why it's so important for children to learn how to write, not type. Though a script becomes worser and worser with the years- less of habit.
I also notice that I personally often treat a piece of paper as an electronic device, looking for an option of "saving" or " undo".
But I don't think that paper will stay a habbit for the next 10-15 years. As soon as children in school use only electronic devices, we can say a very qiuck good bye for paper- which is good in terms of tree-saving but not so good in terms of human thinking.
It was used to be a naive reason of ours when we were not in the mood of taking a test.."We are on a mission of saving trees ..Let's not cut them by utilizing paper sheets in this process...;)
Jokes apart..When I was going through your blog it suddenly popped into my mind that how about replacing the paper currency too..since this process has already been digitalizing gradually ..Things like Digital wallets ( paypal,google wallet etc.. ) are facilitating us so why not this?
I thought I'd seen a pocket whiteboard somewhere that was the size of a single index card. Or rather two folded over so the writing surface wouldn't smudge. I can't find it now.
It reminds me of the diploma, which the ancient Romans used to take notes. It was a pair of tablets hinged together with a layer of wax on the inside. You'd heat the wax to soften it to write, scratch your notes with a stylus, and then the wax would get cool and hard again. You'd fold the two sides together and seal the case to keep the notes from becoming obliterated. We take the modern word "diploma" from that gadget.
Oh. My. Gosh. I need this! I absolutely need this!
Kim, as for a good To-Do list for mobile, I felt the same way until I came across GTasks for Android. It's got a neat widget and you can schedule recurring tasks, which can come in really helpful in my field of work.
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In its mission to make car-buying simple, fair, and fun, TrueCar relies extensively on the Internet, social media, data, and -- increasingly -- mobile to reach its expanding audience of car dealers and consumers. The analysis firm is also relying on Mike Dunn, who joined TrueCar as chief technology officer on May 1, to help steer its technology investments and business priorities.
Marketing departments almost immediately latched onto Twitter as a great tool for spreading word about their brands, but Celina Insurance is using the microblog to help keep the entire company running in the case of emergency or disaster.
Everybody's talking about the rapidly growing importance of mobile channels, not only in social life, but for business too -- whether you're running a city, a hospital, or a school, selling B2B, or engaged in regular retail.
Rob Shoenfelt, CIO at Celina Insurance, is the first to admit that insurance firms aren't known as leading edge adopters of technology. But Celina Insurance isn't like most insurance firms.
When combined with training and management, today's affordable unified communications and collaboration solutions empower midsized organizations to be more efficient and productive. But only if you know how they work, and what they'll need to do their jobs even better.
With 24/7 processing and business continuation paramount, more organizations are considering having three datacenters, where primary and secondary datacenters are in their immediate region and a third is in a remote geography. Why? To avoid repercussions of a major disaster that could hit every IT resource in a specific region.
Multi-tenant clouds assure security for clients, but not necessarily for their ideas. Here's one thing you should discuss with your cloud provider before you sign on.
Businesses helped neighbors with Internet access and mobile device charge-ups during Sandra. Following that example, enterprises should consider preparing Internet disaster plans to help the public during disasters.
Enterprises are discovering that using social networking within the secure setting of a SaaS provider's network gives them an unusual opportunity to freely collaborate with partners, suppliers, and even competitors.
In the interest of providing true 24/7 processing in a global economy, more enterprises are toggling production among datacenters, sharing databases, and placing key IT subject matter experts in remote areas.
Today, most sites manually create scripts for virtual system image and deployment in the cloud. This consumes time and can introduce error. Now, systems vendors are coming to the rescue with new automation tools that expedite and bulletproof the process. This is good news for the cloud.
Nicole and Steve ramble incessantly about the eight things they HATE that people do when using Outlook. Do these and you will be put on their spam list.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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