Paperless office-1

We continue our discussion on paperless office today.
Metaphor and philosophy
Paperless office is also a metaphor for the touting of new technology in terms of 'modernity' rather than its actual suitability to purpose.
The paperless office is now considered to be a philosophy to work with minimal paper and convert all forms of documentation to a digital form. The ideal is driven by a number of motivators including productivity gains, costs savings, space saving, the need to share information and reduced environmental impact. I was talking with owner of blinds store who made roller shades and woven wood shades blinds, he says paperless office is basic requirement for any business in today’s time.

Transforming paper-based documents to digital-based documents
One key aspect of the paperless office philosophy is the conversion of paper documents, photos, engineering plans, microfiche and all the other paper based systems to digital documents. The technologies that may be used include -
1. Scanners
2. High speed scanners - used for scanning very large volumes of paper.
3. Book copiers - used for taking photos of large books and manuscripts.
4. Wide format scanners - used for scanning engineering drawings.
5. Photo scanners
6. Negative scanners
7. Microfiche scanner - used to convert microfiche to digital documents.
8. Digitization of postal mail - provides online access of scanned contents.
9. Fax to PDF conversion
Paperless office is more helpful to term life insurance business and motels owner too. We continue our talk on paperless office and transforming paper-based documents to digital based documents in next post.

Paperless office

The paperless office was a publicist's slogan, meant to describe the office of the future. The basic idea was that office automation would make paper redundant for routine tasks such as record-keeping and bookkeeping. The idea came to prominence with the introduction of the personal computer. While the prediction of a PC on every desk was remarkably prescient, the 'paperless office' was less prophetic. Improvements in printers and photocopiers have made it much easier to produce documents in bulk, word-processing has deskilled secretarial work involved in writing those documents, and paper proliferates. An early prediction of the paperless office was made in a Business Week article in 1975.

Historical paper useContrary to the predictions of the paperless office, the introduction of computers increased paper use, with worldwide use of office paper more than doubling from 1980 to 2000. This has been attributed to the increased ease of document production – rather than needing to type a document up; one may easily print out multiple copies, email it to someone who then prints out a copy, print out a web page, and so forth. However, since about 2000, global use of office paper has leveled off and is now decreasing, which has been attributed to a generation shift, younger people being less inclined to print out documents, and more inclined to read them on a screen.