When scanned we enable the OCR feature so that every item is searchable in Google Drive.
We use the permissions management of Drive to ensure that our accountants can see our bank statements, that our lawyers can see our contracts, and that our staff can each see their HR folder.
The only paper we keep physical copies of are bank statements, receipts and contracts. But as these never need to be accessed unless a dispute or audit requires it, and as they can be found far easier in GDrive, we archive chronologically for storage efficiency and security rather than retrieval efficiency and convenience. Basically... it takes very little space and is stored off-site.
I can't actually imagine running a business any other way.
Now if we can just find something as efficient as a pad on the desk for making temporary notes we'd deal with that last 1%.
Our next goal: Reduce email usage and find collaboration tools that offer better workflow and increased intra-company transparency.
We can use that to verify the state of Google Drive over time as well as to restore should anything ever happen to our Google Drive account (those well-documented instances of people getting locked out of their accounts).
Depends on the country, I suppose. IIRC, in Finland you can ditch the paper copies only after the digital version exists in two places, which could mean GDrive synced with at least one computer, or maybe even the gallery app on your mobile phone.
This sort of scroll behaviour is supposed to be local to the client, not to the website. This sort of stuff breaks accessibility - if the user likes it, the browser (most likely an extension) can implement it.
In my experience, paperless doesn't work unless you also eliminate/greatly downscale your printer (no more hundred-page-per-minute behemoth, trade that in for a slow $50 inkjet MFP from the local department store, and spend the year's maintenance budget on tablets for all) because people still have that ingrained habit of printing all the things.
That way, you can still print/fax if you need to, but now there's an opportunity cost to it. Using the computer is now unambiguously quicker.
And if everyone is "distracted" during a meeting due to tablets, you should probably be asking yourself if the meeting is essential to have. Is whatever topic you're discussing really worth having X people paid Y per hour drop everything they're doing to hash something out that couldn't be done over IM or email? (I find this tack works great with convincing higher-level management who think in dollars and cents)
...digitizing is a boon, make your smart move and switch to Google Drive or Dropbox. Now the good part about this is, you can have all of your gazzlion files on the cloud and access them from anywhere. The better part is you can have all of them indexed!
For ephemeral stuff this is fine, but I'd be really wary of this "digitization solution" for data that matters and what you might want to find some years down the road. This kind of ad-hoc digitization has caused a lot of problems, from documents that simply don't exist anymore, to documents that might exist somewhere but not anywhere anyone can find them. Paper isn't a great solution, but most of the stuff I've actually lost has been digitized stuff on some server or service that disappeared. If you're a bigger company in particular, I'd treat it as an archival problem worth having a proper solution for (perhaps even an in-house archivist whose actual job is managing it).
Vaguely relevant, a cautionary tale that was making the rounds a few years ago: http://wrttn.in/04af1a
I work in an office where actual use of paper is very much in the minority. So much so that when someone actually hands me a piece of paper, my first thought is "well now what do I do with this thing? Isn't this on our (insert share mechanism here)?".
It just evolved to be that way, I don't know of any single decision point where we said nope, done with paper. Obviously won't work for every type of organization, but I'm quite happy not having to deal with physical paper. Feels very... quaint.. to have to do so - like staying at a B&B without, say, electricity, where you must churn your own butter.
Now all that said, there is one huge downside to this type of office - everyone looks at their laptops or tablets in meetings. People are constantly distracted. I haven't been in a meeting in months where everyone is focused (though I can't say that was true of paperful offices either). Is it better/worse? I don't know, but if I had to pick between the two, I'd pick no paper every time.
"everyone looks at their laptops or tablets in meetings."
Trust me when I say most of the people pretending to stare at old fashioned paper are spacing out, thinking about the weekend, shopping lists, daydreaming, etc.
Its not more distracted, its more honest. This is a prime opportunity to improve business procedures and make more money. If its possible to be honest that most meetings are a waste of time, abolish them.
I've spent a lot of time at primate dominance rituals, at slow verbal readings of a previously distributed email/powerpoint, at what amounts to a dramatic presentation with poor stagecraft that should have been done by distributing a professionally edited video, the worlds least efficient way to distribute work material, a very inefficient and expensive way to ensure boring forms are filled out (too beta/lazy to enforce your workers actually work? make them work in a conference room and call it a meeting). I've been to a couple real meetings in my life, mostly brainstorming sessions, but the rest have been a waste of time.
What we need is a meetingless office not a paperless office. Its trivial to waste $10000 worth of aggregate labor and travel budget for a meeting, but really hard to blow $10000 worth of paper in an hour unless you've got a printing press instead of a stereotypical laser printer.
In my experience, it is more distracted. When someone is deep in the mental zone of authoring an email, or caught up in an IM chat, and I just need to ask them if they agree with a technical decision or not, they are definitely too distracted to be effective.
| Trust me when I say most of the people pretending to stare at old fashioned paper are spacing out, thinking about the weekend, shopping lists, daydreaming, etc.
Yes, that is definitely human nature - but it's far easier (IMO) to get someone's attention from a daydream than it is from a screen of blinking notifications.
| What we need is a meetingless office not a paperless office.
I disagree. There are times and places for meetings. Sure, frequent meetings are painful and need to be culled back, but there are just times that you need to sit down with real people and talk through something.
I know this sounds strange, but what about tablets instead? No keyboards, so people can't get too easily distracted. But something to view shared documents, etc.
tablets and smart phones usually are a lot more distracting. I infact find it annoying when i try to make a point and find someone fiddling with their gadgets, even though they probably are trying to find some facts for the conversation and are not generally yak shaving. But may be again its just me.
I'm sorry to break the eco-parade, but this just doesn't fit with my work. At all.
I wouldn't put my company's documents in the cloud. Google, are you kidding me? Then again most of my work is security orientated. So my experience might differ.
Second, as a developer, I wouldn't give-up pen and paper for doing mathematics and for doodling algorithms and attempts at solving daily problems. I tried to do it on the computer a lot of times but it's just a waste of time and I always end-up focusing on the tools rather on the problem at hand.
From my experience these paperless speeches come from SUV drivers that read about it in this months Corporate Magazine's issue.
Let's hope your office is secure since your security model relies on preventing physical access.
Your point about focusing too much on the tools when going digital is important. Often I get sucked into some fancy ToDo app for my short lists of personal tasks. Down I go into the rabbit hole of productivity apps and soon enough I realize I should have just scribbled it on a piece of paper and be done with it instead of buying into a whole ecosystem of digital tools to manage tasks that will be thought of, recorded and completed in minutes or hours.
> Let's hope your office is secure since your security model relies on preventing physical access.
It doesn't have to be physical. I can just store documents on a server that I own and have control over. That still doesn't make it secure because I have to watchout for 0-days and what not. And even then it wouldn't be secure.
But at least I have controllability and observability. I can access and modify them anytime I want to and I also know when someone had unauthorized access to them.
Of course this is not entirely true in Mission Impossible like scenarios. And I'm not saying everyone should do what I do.
But I profundly dislike the superior attitude in articles such as these where the author tells me what to do and asks me why I'm not doing it yet.
>It irks me, we’ve been listening to this for the last many decades and still continue to look at it as a dream. Why is your office not a paperless one yet? Where did it go wrong? Does it not seem absurd when we have been able to get our ride on Mars and yet we’ve no effective solution to make our offices paperless?
Not sure what he means. My office, as most I know nowadays, are already 99% paperless. The only paper around is some scratchpad I like to scribble ideas on.
Now if you work in accounting (with all receipts and stuff) or in law this might be different, but for the regular office, and especially IT? We're there.
I have no reason to doubt that you're there. But trust me, we're not all there. There's no way an office of our size could go through the paper we do without printers and copiers (unless we were all flat-out copy typists). This has been true wherever I've worked.
This website will not load with ghostery on. I have played with the settings a little bit and it seems that the blocking script is google analytics. I hope this thing does not become a trend.
Paper or no paper is not the real problem. It's to archive* or not to archive that is the issue with most.
From my experience running a web design and development company is that paper files a lot like email archives are kept but not accessed. I have 1 drawer filled with paper files related to a handful of my clients, and I can't say I access them enough to warrant keeping or even scanning them (akin to moving your paper files to a storage locker). Mostly they become paper "todos" which need to be kept so I can address them later.
I had the same experience when I moved from Thunderbird to GMail. At first I was concerned I wouldn't have easy access to my dozens and dozens of archived email folders, diligently filled with all client emails from the past 5+ years. Fast forward to 3 months of using Gmail and I can count on one hand the number of times I booted up Thunderbird to find an old email.
Papers, notes, files and (even)digital archives are safety blankets, future tasks and baggage weighing us down and keeping us from the important work at hand.
Also eliminate the FAX. I haven't had access to one for a couple years but my VOIP provider needs it to make account changes (pure WTF there) and my legacy insurer accepts claims over FAX (which are then expensively data entered by hand... somebody should tell them about that new fangled "CGI webform" thing from the 90s)
(edited to add my wife had some stock brokerage thing that needed faxing, and we discovered the hard way there's predatory faxing "services" out there which will send your fax... for $1 a page, and of course the idiot form is 20 pages long, so there goes $10 vs a couple cents if we mailed it)
IANAL, etc., but I believe there's lot's of good legal precedent around the legitimacy of FAX, and a lot of doubt and uncertainty about other electronic transfers of documents. So FAX is the safe choice.
The comedic part is how out of date technologically that is. I was going to scan the account update form, edit it on the computer including cut and paste my signature in, then hook up an old fashioned modem to send the tiff just like I used to send FAXes in the 90s. But I couldn't find an analog line and working modem so I ended up emailing them the heavily edited scan, which they accepted.
In the heyday of modems perhaps 20 years ago, this was "normal" if you already had a scanner, you could send faxes using most higher end modems, like 14.4 and faster. So this has been technologically obsolete as an authentication system for a couple decades.
I believe the belief comes from the bad old days of itemized long distance billing. AT&T will send a bill to me proving I sent "something" to them so if they claim I didn't, then produce what they claim I sent. Sorta registered mail service, kind of. But itemized long distance billing is dead.
For HN readers too young to know what itemized long distance billing is, before the modern era of "all minutes are free" you'd seriously, no kidding, get a paper bill listing all your interLATA phone calls and what they cost.
Wash DC 202 123-4567 5 minutes daytime rate subtotal $10
It makes sense if it fits your workflow. We're using Google Docs and are pretty happy with it. For signing we're using PandaDoc (https://www.pandadoc.com) and it saves a lot of time as well. It's really hard to imagine that I'm doing printing, signing and faxing it back with paper nowadays. If tools help you to be more productive and save time, that's the way to go.
I am working since 1994 and I can ensure you that the amount of paper produces has never stopped reducing. We have shared directory where we had many shelves.
Paperless office is not yet there, but it is always improving. For example, I am changing my bank and my main complain against my previous bank is that it was too much paper.
This doesn't mean we do not keep paper, but every receipt, bank statement, and contract gets scanned ( http://www.amazon.com/Fujitsu-ScanSnap-Instant-Sheet-Fed-Sca... ) and goes into Google Drive.
When scanned we enable the OCR feature so that every item is searchable in Google Drive.
We use the permissions management of Drive to ensure that our accountants can see our bank statements, that our lawyers can see our contracts, and that our staff can each see their HR folder.
The only paper we keep physical copies of are bank statements, receipts and contracts. But as these never need to be accessed unless a dispute or audit requires it, and as they can be found far easier in GDrive, we archive chronologically for storage efficiency and security rather than retrieval efficiency and convenience. Basically... it takes very little space and is stored off-site.
I can't actually imagine running a business any other way.
Now if we can just find something as efficient as a pad on the desk for making temporary notes we'd deal with that last 1%.
Our next goal: Reduce email usage and find collaboration tools that offer better workflow and increased intra-company transparency.