This month started off with World Paper Free Day, an initiative that discourages the use of paper in the office (and business in general) and that promotes digital alternatives. Paper remains a huge challenge for customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, digital transformation and profit across many industries.
In this digital day and age, it’s critical to digitise paper-based processes and capture important information from hard copy documents to automate and feed efficient processes. It is perfectly possible to achieve, regardless of the precise context, thanks to intelligent capture software and professional document scanners.
However, in practice, a lot needs to be done before organisations get there. This year, AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) asked its Twitter followers to comment on what it means to go #paperless? Many agree it’s time for a change but as usual there are differences when it comes to the how.
World Paper Free Day is an annual event created by AIIM in order to promote awareness about both the business and environmental impacts of continuing to use paper. People are encouraged to pledge to give up the use of paper for a single day.
From paper reduction to the paperless ideal
The early days: paper reduction
The conversation about reducing paper use in the workplace has been going on seemingly forever. As early as 1980, the U.S. government, for instance, passed the Paperwork Reduction Act designed to lower the amount of paperwork that business had to file for taxes and other purposes. In the following years corporations began to understand the cost savings and other business goals that could be achieved with the reduction in paper use. In the 1995 edition of its Environmental Progress Report, Bank of America reported that is had reached an 18 percent decline in photocopy paper and 32 percent decline in computer paper over a year. Those savings were created by implementing duplex scanners combined with a small employee awareness program, resulting in $1 million that year.
Paper reduction is improving but slowly – source AIIM SlideShare – also see below
The declaration of the war on paper
However, the real idea of a completely paper free office only started to appear once the personal computer gained fairly widespread adoption in the early 2000’s. Software makers could really see the potential to replace both paper and processes. Is was at this point that somewhere along the line a “war on paper” was declared and although it wasn’t fierce, in many cases it led to do distraction from the ultimate goal of business improvement.
Unlike the Bank of America’s minor steps in 1995, today becoming paper free is acknowledged to be a huge cultural and technological change that should be done holistically with regard not only to paper reduction but the business goals of the organisation as well. This is because although the digital age is here, paper is still everywhere we look and it’s interesting to the see the progress that has been made in the previous decades.
How paperless are we today – and what’s holding us back?
According to an AIIM study, some of the main reasons why people are printing paper copies concern the same issues that have been discussed for a very long time. An example: even though Microsoft Word has been ubiquitous for over a decade, over 45% of respondents indicated they would personally resort to printing a version to review or to mark up a document with changes. There is an ever higher desire to use paper over e-signatures, where over 50% of respondents indicated they would resort to printing if they had to add a signature.
“Paperless Dilemma No. 1 — Paper Persistence” by @jmancini77 on @LinkedIn http://t.co/3Kr6xB0gjH
— John Mancini (@jmancini77) November 7, 2014
Digital tools – and a matter of culture
The relatively simple reasons why people still choose to use paper show that in many instances people prefer to use paper than to do the action digitally with the tools that they have available in their workspace. Thinking about the problem in the frame of how to reduce paper consumption is one of the reasons why a “war on paper” doesn’t really work because what really needs to be done is the creation of good alternatives. A more productive approach involves thinking deeply about what makes electronic documents and processes easier to use.
Disconnected systems in the document context
Although the data looks somewhat dire, the situation has obviously improved. One can hardly imagine somebody writing their documents in multiple drafts on pieces of paper rather than using a word processor for example. But a stumbling blocks begins to appear when people need to collaborate or share some information. With the fragmentation in today’s office application, especially the separation of process based applications and content creation applications in different systems, this will be a difficult hurdle to overcome.
“We are still drowning in unnecessary paper, at home and at work,” said John Mancini, president of Silver Spring, MD-based AIIM. If the whole world gets behind this, we could save around 821,918 tons of paper and 10,958,904 trees – that’s got to be worth thinking about.” Read more on CMSWire.Two focus areas towards a paperless future
Of course, the solution for each business is going to look different but to have a chance at slowly eliminating most paper based functions in an organisation, companies should start with two focus areas. The capture and extraction of information coming into the organisation and the ease with which employees can create and share content as well as reference the information required to do so.
Capture and extraction in a multi-channel environment
The first step is to capture the information that comes from outside sources. Document capture and extracting the key information of paper documents is important here. Moreover, it isn’t just about one type of documents or data. Different document and data formats come in every day: emails with pdf’s, invoices, structured forms, bills of lading etc. Multiple information and communication sources and formats carry data that is essential for an organisation in order to achieve their business goals. The implementation will differ depending on the type of business.
However, the idea of the Digital Mailroom is clearly gaining steam. A place where all incoming information is routed through, to be extracted. This achieves the first piece of the puzzle capturing the documents and information, already it should become easier to reference.
Connecting the docs and dots: processes, availability and collaboration
With recent progress and options like mobile capture, archiving documents is no longer a problem, but this is not an improvement over paper, because it can store information too. The issue is organising and using the contents efficiently, after all what is a the difference between a real stack of unorganised paper and an electronic one. The real difficulty comes when we want to move a step further past the capability of paper. Large amounts of paper and employee time can be saved by automatically moving the information necessary from these incoming documents and datasets to their respective business processes automatically. However to go further, the information and the respective documents, have to be made easily available to content creators and other knowledge workers, not just inserted automatically into automated processes. By mastering the information management needs of knowledge workers companies can finally create an environment where working without paper becomes and easier and actually preferable.
Paperless Dilemma No. 2 — Legal Limbo – http://t.co/WUXNhsUV45 #wpfd #aiim #arma #infogov pic.twitter.com/igJ11TqfzM — John Mancini (@jmancini77) November 10, 2014
As we study more and more why people continue to choose paper to do their work and endeavor to solve those paper challenges we can more easily move towards that future.
Der Beitrag Going paperless: better processes, less paper erschien zuerst auf KnowledgeShare by Kodak Alaris Information Management.