Unless a
drastic change occurs in the way that almost everyone does
business, the
paperless office can never become a reality. Even with
computers encroaching on every facet of our lives, we are as
reliant on paper now as ever before. In the office where I work, the use of computers has increased, but we are using the computers to produce even more paper, and can anyone show me an office without a
photocopier?
Important documents must be
signed, files containing many different types of information (ie. not all
computer printouts) must be stored, and receipts for
Bank and ordinary
cheques have to be filed. To transfer that sort of information to computer (and to make it a
standard procedure) takes much more
time,
effort, and
money (we don't have a
scanner here, and we don't need one) than the
end result justifies.
Also, even though I'm more of a
pyro than a
hacker, I'd still consider it easier to lose a network full of
data than to destroy documents in
fireproof safes housed in an office.
00100 tells me that they used to work at a company that specialised in
digitising documents from paper. Even though the amount of paper that their
clients had to keep
theoretically
diminished, the
scanning room had more paper in it than the rest of the building.