Taking stock of it all

Tebbutt at large

perless office is still very far from reality. Dave Tebbutt argues that organisations looking to abandon the printed word must focus on where resistance is weakest. Is your office paperless yet? Why not? If IT can't set an example in paperlessness, how is the rest of the company supposed to buy into the idea? I bet you use email in place of paper memos - except for the important ones, that is.

Then there's the post. Because computers make producing letters so easy, we get more of them. How many letters do you get in a week from people you neither know nor care about? I bet it's substantial. This is because personalised letters can be banged out by the thousand with a database of prospects, a goodly stock of paper, and a beefy laser printer.

In theory, the Internet will save paper, but I'm not so sure. If you find something of interest on the Net, what do you do with it? Save it so you can read it on-screen later or print it out? If you don't like reading longish documents on-screen, imagine how your average user feels?

People like paper. It is more flexible - in both senses of the word - than any of today's computers.

It can be folded and stuffed in a pocket. It can be used just about anywhere, including the toilet, which is unlikely to go paperless. Reading and annotation do not require some technological intermediary. In short, paper is eminently fit for its purpose.

Maybe the idea of a paperless office was ill-conceived in the first place.

Individuals who work in fixed locations are not motivated to go paperless unless they happen to be shackled to the corporate workflow system. The people who are most likely to embrace paperlessness are those on the move.

Those on the move don't want to haul unnecessary paper around with them, or duplicate information cluttering up their homes, cars or drop-in centres.

However, they do need access to relevant information at all times. From a fixed location the answer is straightforward: a computer with a connection to the company network, either leased or dial up, depending on need.

For the truly mobile individual, a personal organiser connected to - or even inside - a mobile telephone will do nicely. These devices are adequate for preparing and displaying emails and documents, which is what most of us want to do on the move. The main problem with data over mobile phones is the connection speed - 9600 baud at present.

Company bro- chures and product literature can be stored once on the company intranet. Some forward-thinking companies have banned paper sales literature from their branch offices and retail outlets.

The paperless office will not arrive with a bang. It will sneak in quietly and from unexpected directions. Just as we once saw 'islands of computing' coalesce into network, so we will witness the gradual arrival of the paperless office. It will start with nomadic and home-based workers and then spread as off-site working becomes more common.

Pressures to go paperless will come from convenience. A major aspect of convenience is ease of retrieval. Search engines which understand natural language are beginning to appear. Imagine the impact on keyboard-phobic users, if these were coupled to speech recognition? And this can be done today. The trouble is, users still might end up printing the found documents.

But at least they would see a value in creating and storing original documents in electronic form.

If you have a strategic objective to diminish or eliminate paper from day-to-day business activities, you might get the best results by focusing your energies at the fringe of the organisation, and work your way in towards the centre. Resistance to going digital is too high in the physical office. The officeless office is where resistance is weakest. Just like a lake freezing over - the centre succumbs last.