There are 875 million good reasons why the paperless office won't happen soon The UK government has awarded a contract worth up to £875m for a range of printer hardware and multi-function devices in a move which again raises questions about whether the paperless office was a dream that has faded in the recesses of our collective memory. In a contract award notice, the Crown Commercial Service (CCS), …
Well, it really depends, doesn't it? The paperless office I mean, not the other examples.
I used to be more of a programmer, data analyst in previous jobs. I did print a few things, especially when reading technical, mathematical or scientific texts - it just seems easier to do that on paper. Jumping back and forth, cross-referencing, folding parts of pages over, heavily commenting and marking with a pen is just not possible (or not as easy) in any electronic format.
Now I am more of a penpusher, having a more manglement-oriented position. Interestingly enough I now print less. I produce way more documents, but as they are simpler in some way (no hard to understand equations) I print way less. Maybe for the last readthrough before stuff is finally submitted to the higher echelons in the diverse boards that have to make the final business decisions.
I also find it interesting that in the whole of the company, on average, people seem to print much more than I ever did. Talking to my closest colleagues tells me it is not our department.
But I completely agree: fully paperless is not going to happen.And I believe it is a good thing. Should we print less? Sure. Does a ton of unneccessary stuff get printed? Also yes. Can we completely get rid of printing documents? No way.
Now, where can I get my flying car thingy that I was promised? I don't find jetpacks that appealing, it's just too cold in winter...
Not to mention that toilet paper in the business environment is starting to look more and more like corrugated cardboard, if not actually sandpaper.
I would really like to know what the "manager's" toilet paper line is in the beancounter's ledgers, because I'm absolutely certain that they're not using the crap they give to the underlings.
I used to give a presentation on "Office Automation" MANY years ago for a computer manufacturer.
My first slide gave the different terms, such as "The Electronic Office", "Office Automation", "Computers on the Desktop" and "The Paperless Office".
If I got a laugh when I said that the Paperless Office was as likely and as useful as the Paperless Loo, I knew the presentation was going to go well.
I didn't get a laugh out of a bunch of Trade Union Officials!!!!
>How much CO2 is wasted just to make and ship/distribute all that paper?
Probably less than you would think
Paper is an insanely competitive microscopic-margin business. So costs are cut to the whatsit, hence very little energy is wasted - mills run on burning the unused off cuts etc.
It's heavy so is being delivered by the container load on ships
Thanks for a serious answer. Half-baked rebuttal...
I interviewed at an electric utility in Duluth, Minnesota. Their control room's one-wire system map specifically had the local paper mill called out since they were a top (maybe even THE top) customer. That's a lot of 'leccy on top of burning waste, and most of that was either North Dakota coal delivered by train or power via super-long HVDC line straight from a generation plant near the coal mine.
As for transport, what about the semi-trucks (lorries) supplying the big-box office stores and/or box trucks delivering to copious offices? On a per-ream basis Shirley those vehicles belch more carbon (and other pollution) than container ships.
I've been in the IT side of this business for 15 years - and have sold Tin as well as Solutions "to reduce print" - sorry no paperless is a ridiculous concept - we reached a plateau a number of years ago and I cant see any reductions.
Even in my firm - which is one of the largest players - and promotes Print Management! - you should hear the howls when we changed the print server 2 weeks ago, meaning printing was offline briefly or the ERP system doesn't print for 20 minutes.
Its not in the industries interest of course we know that - but the customers don't want the change - and with the largest sectors I've been involved with - Education and Financial the demand has never seen major falls.
The biggest reduction in print volumes? - Covid and closed offices.
Don't knock Education. The teachers need 30 copies of the day's exercise page - and they don't have 30 copies of the book to hand out.
If Education was treated as seriously as the military budget, then that wouldn't happen, but the big bucks go to the boys in uniform, so teachers have to make do with photocopies.
That's just the way it is.
When I was a councillor a few years back, all council meeting minutes had to be printed out, signed by the chairman, then scanned back in, to be emailed out as massive PDFs. Changing the procedure to allow electronic signatures would eliminate the need to print anything, and result in smaller less energy sapping PDFs.
One council I have dealings, the Councillors demanded and got top end iPads so their meeting could go paperless. Within months, they were back to printing and distributing reports because flicking through multiple sheets of paper, spreading out multiple documents on the desk to refer to, is far more efficient and better for finding information than on a little tablet screen!
The big but commonly ignored hazard of fully paperless is that records become ephemeral. I have handled physical books up to around 300 years old, and mostly they're still in pretty good condition. On the other hand, quite part from the intrinsic durability limits of electronic records (e.g. charge leakage from solid state devices, physical wear of spinning discs, connectors &c.), standards and technologies keep changing, so for both reasons regular re-archiving becomes essential. Equally important, reverse engineering of obsolete devices is becoming increasingly difficult as the technologies become less and less transparent (and frequently proprietary). So to read that document, we have to contend with connector pinout, signal and power voltages, data encoding, file format, content encoding and more.
Only on Star Trek are centuries-old computers still operational and their files immediately accessible to folks who never saw the equipment before.
I've had video files from less than 4 years ago no longer play. I don't know why, they're supposed to be MPEGs, but I assume they're subtly non-standard as current players refuse to have anything to do with them.
And that's not mentioning the Adobe Flash files that of course are no longer playable. So my "Romeo & Juliet in L33TSP34K" is just a blob now.
Try using ffmpeg on them. Usually, if there's something unusual about the file or the player, ffmpeg can turn the file into something the player can understand. Unless it just got corrupted. It doesn't work on everything, so if it used a very proprietary codec somewhere it might fail, but most ones were identified and implemented there at some point.
I'm 57 years old. I've been programming since I was 14. I have lost my email, lost access to accounts, and fried entire computers so many times I've lost track.
If it is tax-related, it gets printed. I trust my computer as far as I can kick it down the block, and as it is a massive server case, that isn't very far...
On a related note, I read recently the story of how Lancaster (UK) lost the 'leccy for several hours in the 2015 storms. Folks were so glued to technology it was a shock to many how much they were reliant on it. The paper records, your grandads filofax etc were still all accessible (even though the mobile phones were mostly dead) so yes I also understand why print still matters.
Our development office uses printers just to print the stuff HR/accounting offices require us to print and sign, because they don't accept any other way. They look unable to provide forms in PDF (let alone websites...), nor accept them signed electronically and not printed on paper. We also have to deliver them personally... probably they believe this way they can impose those pesky employees pay reverence to HR and accounting.
I really forgot the last time we replaced the toner because it's very few pages per month.
That said, I print some legal documents too because my backups are OK but I prefer to have a printed backups as well. While traveling abroad in the past weeks I also had some printed copies of tickets and the various needed visas and certificates - my phone could always have an issue or simply a depleted battery.
Another story of waste to bolster your point :
I have been in need of a respirator for the past decade, in order to sleep properly. At the beginning, I recieved monthly invoices by snail mail and thought nothing of it. Then, after paying the invoices, I got individual snail mails with the invoice, marked "Payé" (because I'm French, living in France).
So, just to be clear, the company managing my subscription would send me three invoices every quarter - in individual envelopes containing a response envelope - and when I had paid via bank transfer, I would get three envelopes with the invoice marked "Payé".
Once I realized just how much paper was being wasted I contacted the company and asked if it was possible to get the invoices digitally at my email address - which they already had.
No, it wasn't.
I have been asking regularly since, and the answer is always the same : no.
Recently, I got a snail mail from them indicating basically that they were looking for "generous donators" to help them weather "a difficult financial situation". I took one look at that mail and said to myself : "sort out your fucking snail mail and you'll find that you'll have saved hundreds of thousands of euros on useless paper mails".
The issue, as I understand it, is that manglement sees that the current system works, and if it works, why fix it ? Here's a reason : you're wasting a ton of money when you could send your invoices digitally and save all those postage stamps.
You want help ? Start by helping yourself.
I think that's in the Bible somewhere.
We're a software dev company, the company isn't entirely paperless, HR and finance still print and keep stuff for regulation purposes, but the rest of the company hardly prints anything. I use the printer maybe twice a year. At home, I've had my laser printer prob over six years and I changed the cartridge once, it had most use out of it when I was unemployed and had to deal with unemployment bureaus which love the stuff, they love you to submit reams of paper to them every month, and they used to bury me in the stuff right back, giving my binders to file the masses away in.
Now back in a programming job, I have a notebook to take a few notes now and then, some postits to stick on monitors and a few pages from courses I attended.
AT home, most of my outgoing costs are automated and they don't send me paper bills any more, apart from my health insurance, which still sends me paper, but I think it's another regulatory thing here.
Most likely, these printers will be "free" at the point of use and the suppliers will be "managing" them and charging the customers/departments on a per page basis. Those departments with an eye on costs may well reducing printing, but most won't since "it's just taxpayers money".
Well, that's not quite true: for a couple of years we had to print out a single sheet to accompany expense reports. Aside from that, whilst there are printers in the offices, I cannot remember the last time anyone used one.
My last role was at a home loan lender, we pushed for paperless because we were printing a couple of tress a day worth of 200 - 300 page loan documents.
Nearly 2 and a half years later we had a document management system in place, mainly because of the legal side of things making sure all the relevant laws were kept to, privacy protections were adhered to etc.
In the first month, staff started noticing content started missing from the document, a few characters on one page, then whole lines of info, so of course we panicked and called the vendor and got the "We've never seen this before" response.
It took them nearly 6 months to sort out the issue and in that time we had to go back to paper printing and scanning them in as separate documents in a file share.
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