The Paperless Office - Finally More Than a Marketing Slogan
The development of the modern office computer and subsequent electronic
document has made the goal of paperless day-to-day office operations a
technical and practical possibility. It may be time to seriously consider the promise of this goal.
Consider the following three facts:
- Nationally, we produce and consume about 99 million tons of
paper and paperboard per year.
- A ream of virgin office paper weighing about three pounds
requires approximately seven and a half pounds of raw wood ingredients.
- Paper and paperboard products make up 34% of the US waste
stream headed for our landfills, and untold energy resources are expended
logging, processing, and transporting our national paper goods. Untold
more tons of pollutants are released into our air and water during the
paper manufacturing process.
It's safe to say that our addiction to paper takes a significant toll
on our forests and our ecosystem. Clearly, the bottom line of most
small businesses and the health of our ecosystem would all be in a
better state if we could reduce the amount of paper we consume and
increase our recycling efforts.
The Promise of the Paperless
Office
The term "paperless office" has been around
since the widespread adoption of the personal computer in business. It
may have started out as a publicity slogan and has certainly been used
as a promise of each new rendition of office machine or computer
platform since. Largely though, the promise of the paperless office has
proven impractical.
The invention of paper is dated to China's Emperor Wu around 140 BC. In
the intervening centuries, humankind has had plenty of time to develop
the paper habit and ingrain it into every aspect of our modern lives.
More recently, the development of the electronic document and email may
make a largely paperless office a possible near-term goal, if we can
get ourselves accustomed to reading on an electronic screen with the
same comfort we associate to ink on squashed paper pulp, and if we can
break the automatic "print all" habit.
One area where reduction of paper usage is easy to make and may have
the power to increase the efficiency of an operation is through the
adoption of the electronic interactive document. Rather than a box, gadget, or computer program, an interactive or "living" document refers more to a philosophy of data management. This format perfectly lends itself to documents that need to be accessed by many different people within an organization, require some level of control of versions, and need to be quickly and easily updated or changed.
Possible practical usage for living documents might be employee training manuals, Procedure and Instruction documents, Standard Operating Guides, Standing Medical Orders, or data indexes.
In an average-sized organization, a revision of Operating Guides or
employee training manuals can involve days of labor and perhaps
hundreds of dollars in printing and binding, along with the associated waste. If
these same documents were in electronic format, the update may take a
matter of hours to fully implement and cost little or nothing.
Currently, the most practical method of creating digital (non-paper)
interactive documents is the hyperlinked PDF file. PDFs (Portable
Document Files) placed on a company network can be easily accessed by
any employee, transmitted via e-mail, stored on a hard disk, and can be revised in a
matter of moments. In addition, hyperlinking to web addresses can allow
an end user of a document to "drill down" through links to websites or
other documents for additional subject depth. And you never need to
print a single sheet of paper.
The really great news is that software capable of creating dynamic,
interactive, hyperlinked, PDF documents are OpenSource and are
therefore completely free.
Look at OpenSource programs NeoOffice and OpenOffice.
And enough with all that
printing!
|
